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 Heaven by the hems; And lo, Christ walking on the water Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

“Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons; now, because they are talking about something too large for anyone to understand, and now again because they are talking about something too small for anyone to see…  [T]here was one poem of which the image was so vast that it was literally difficult for a time to take it in; he was describing the evening earth with its mist and fume and fragrance, and represented the whole as rolling upwards like a smoke; then suddenly he called the whole ball of the earth a thurible, and said that some gigantic spirit swung it slowly before God.  That is… the image too large for comprehension.  Another instance sticks in my mind of the image which is too small.  In one of his poems, he says that [the] abyss between the known and unknown is bridged by ‘Pontifical death’.  There are about ten historical and theological puns in that one word.  That a priest means a pontiff, that a pontiff means a bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that death may turn out after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least priests and bridges both attest to the fact that one thing can get separated from another thing—these ideas and twenty more, are all actually concentrated in the word ‘pontifical’.  In Francis Thompson’s poetry, as in the poetry of the universe, you can work infinitely out and out, but yet infinitely in and in.  These two infinities are the mark of greatness; and he was a great poet.”  (‘The Dead Poet’, All Things Considered, London, 1908)

Il n’y a qu’une tristesse, c’est de n’être pas des saints.