What a great thread. Impossible to pick just one! I love ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ and so many others already mentioned, especially those by Shakespeare, Donne, GM Hopkins and Yeats.
Recently I have appreciated ‘In No Strange Land’ by Francis Thompson. I like the poem and the story behind it – that he was living on the streets of London for three years, homeless and addicted to opium, sent in some poems to a periodical and was rescued from the streets by the couple who ran it.
In No Strange Land
O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air—
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry,—clinging to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!
- Francis Thompson (1859-1907)
I especially like the two lines about Jacob’s ladder.
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