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Thompson, Francis - An anthem of Earth
Identifier
000860
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
The Hound of Heaven and other poems – Francis Thompson
from An anthem of Earth
Who the chart shall draw
Of the strange courts and vaulty labyrinths
The spacious tenements and wide pleasances,
Innumerable corridors, far withdrawn,
Wherein I wander darkling of myself?
Darkling I wander, nor I dare explore
The long arcane of those dim catacombs
Where the rat memory does its burrows make
Close seal them as I may
….............
Then go I, my foul venting ignorance
With scabby sapience plastered, aye forsooth!
Clap my wise foot-rule to the walls of the world
And vow – A goodly house, but something ancient
And I can find no Master.
…............
It is distraught
With ghostly usurpation, dinned and fretted
With the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement
Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries