One of my favorite poems of all time. Francis Thompson (DOB 1859) was an English poet and artist. For years, he lived the life of a homeless heroin addict on the street, his bed made under the varying bridges crossing the Thames. He'd pull odd scraps of paper from trash cans and scratch out the most gripping, heart-rending poetry the nation of Britain and seen in decades. The poetry he would submit to various local papers, but he would send it anonymously. The papers were known to advertise for him, saying that the greatest poet of their time lived among them, yet they didn't know his first name. The following poem captures the encounter Thompson had with an imminent God, a God that didn't abandon him to rummage through the garbage of earth for the vindication of Thompson's deepest needs, a but a God who was the savior who walked the barren alley of Thompson's home to find him. Thompson is better known for his poem, "The Hound of Heaven."

The Kingdom of God

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 rumor 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 estrang?d faces,
That miss the many-splendored 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!

Francais Thompson

Thoughts?