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Francis Thompson's "The Kingdom of God" · The Daily Poem

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, July 29th, 2026.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today's poem is by Francis Thompson,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Victorian poet best known for his poem, The Hound of Heaven.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's sometimes described even as a mystic.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today's poem is called The Kingdom of God.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Kingdom of God.
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  SPEAKER_00: O world invisible, we view thee.
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  SPEAKER_00: O world intangible, we touch thee.
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  SPEAKER_00: O world unknowable, we know thee.
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  SPEAKER_00: Inapprehensible, we clutch thee.
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  SPEAKER_00: Does the fish soar to find the ocean?
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  SPEAKER_00: The eagle plunge to find the air?
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  SPEAKER_00: That we ask the stars in motion if they have rumor of thee there.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not where the wheeling systems darken and our benumbed conceiving sores,
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  SPEAKER_00: the drift of pinions would we hearken beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
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  SPEAKER_00: The angels keep their ancient places, turn but a stone and start a wing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tis ye, tis your estranged faces that miss the many-splendored thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: But, When so sad thou canst not sadder, cry,
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  SPEAKER_00: and upon thy so sore loss shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder,
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  SPEAKER_00: pitched betwixt heaven and charing cross.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yea, in the night,
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  SPEAKER_00: my soul,
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  SPEAKER_00: my daughter, cry,
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  SPEAKER_00: clinging to heaven by the hems,
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  SPEAKER_00: and lo, Christ walking on the water, not of Gennesareth, but Thames.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday's poem was by Philip Larkin,
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  SPEAKER_00: and I described it as a poem about losing the sense of the transcendent.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this seems like a nice companion.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thompson seems to be urging a whole generation of people in his audience
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  SPEAKER_00: to recognize that even what seems to have vanished Thompson is
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  SPEAKER_00: a contemporary
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  SPEAKER_00: of Gerard Manley Hopkins,
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  SPEAKER_00: and they seem to have similar projects,
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  SPEAKER_00: although they approach them from a different direction.
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  SPEAKER_00: If Hopkins is sort of the Aristotelian poet,
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  SPEAKER_00: finding the glory of God concealed deep down in ordinary things— Thompson is
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  SPEAKER_00: the platonic version.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's more concerned with the forms.
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  SPEAKER_00: The glory of God is not concealed deep down things, but just behind the material world.
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  SPEAKER_00: The kingdom of God, as the title suggests and alludes to, is present, is today, is now.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not just a cosmic, faraway reality beyond the stars, and his final stanzas bring that home.
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  SPEAKER_00: You need only turn over a stone along your path to reveal the waiting place
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  SPEAKER_00: of some angel, whether you can see it or not.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he envisions Jacob's ladder,
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  SPEAKER_00: the path by which spirits and souls ascend and descend between heaven and earth,
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  SPEAKER_00: not in some faraway holy land, but in Charing Cross Road.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when the soul, desperate and Bereft, cries out, clinging to heaven by the hems.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is such a great image.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord comes walking to them,
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  SPEAKER_00: not across the distant and foreign waters of Gennesaret or Galilee,
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  SPEAKER_00: but of the Thames.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because that is where the immediate need is.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is where the kingdom is.
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  SPEAKER_00: Here's the poem one more time.
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  SPEAKER_00: O world invisible, we view thee.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: O world intangible, we touch thee.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: O world unknowable, we know thee.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Inapprehensible, we clutch thee.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Does the fish soar to find the ocean?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: The eagle plunge to find the air?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: That we ask of the stars in motion if they have rumor of thee there?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Not where the wheeling systems darken and our benumbed conceiving soars.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: The drift of pinions would we hearken beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: The angels keep their ancient places, Turn but a stone and start a wing.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Tis ye, tis your estranged faces That miss the many-splendored thing.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: But when so sad thou canst not sadder, Cry,
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: and upon thy so sore loss Shall shine the traffic
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: of Jacob's ladder Pitched betwixt heaven and charring cross.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yea, in the night my soul,
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  SPEAKER_00: my daughter, Cry,
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  SPEAKER_00: clinging to heaven by the hems,
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  SPEAKER_00: And lo, Christ walking on the water, not of Gennesaret, but Thames.
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  SPEAKER_00: This has been The Daily Poem.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
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  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back tomorrow with another subscriber poem and here on the main channel on Friday.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can find us at dailypoempod.substack.com to listen to past episodes of
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: The Daily Poem,
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  SPEAKER_00: including,
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  SPEAKER_00: if you search our archives,
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  SPEAKER_00: at least one recording of Francis Thompson's The Hound of Heaven.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can also subscribe and support the show.
• 5:29
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• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: or as I'm often fond of saying,
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• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or ask fellow readers about their thoughts on each day's episode.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: For all of us at Goldberry Studios,
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  SPEAKER_00: especially our intrepid engineer Logan Green,
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  SPEAKER_00: who is almost as dogged in his labors as the hound of heaven himself,
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm Sean Johnson wishing you happy reading.