An accentual reading, producing two major stresses per line, feels more natural, and closer to the cadence of spoken prayer: “O world invisible / we view thee.” We might decide it’s iambic tetrameter with feminine endings in stanza one and alternating feminine/masculine endings elsewhere, but that risks clamping it in prosodic chains. The unusual metre should be mentioned at this point. Rhyme, rhythm and image unfold in lieu of argument. Any claim that mystical experience occurs somehow beyond or outside the senses is refuted. Grammatical ambiguity enhances its complexity: is it noun or adjective, and if the latter, does it govern “world” or “we”? Thompson plays an addictive music, and although it may be going too far to deduce a linguistic parallel with his opium habit, the aesthetics of repetition are deeply involved in this poem. And then the symmetry is shattered by the rather magnificent six-syllable Latinate word, “inapprehensible”. “O world invisible, we view thee, / O world intangible, we touch thee, / O world unknowable, we know thee, / Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!” The triple apostrophe “O world … ” establishes the incantation, and invites us to park rational objection. It can be seen, touched and known.Īntithesis is the foundational, unifying mystery on which the whole poem is built, a reconciliation of the irreconcilable, extending from the invisible light – that we can nevertheless see – to the ladder of angels “pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross” and the final vision of Christ walking on the water “Not of Gennesareth but Thames!”
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It represents Eternity and reveals God, but Thompson’s vision declares it local. The world he’s addressing (“O world”) is otherworldly, like Henry Vaughan’s “world of light” and the “world without end” ( in saecula saeculorum) of certain doxologies. Thompson’s quatrain sets off four flashes of light, each illuminating a core paradox of mystical understanding. Perhaps Thompson is more echoed than echoing? TS Eliot seems to have comandeered the first apostrophe, and expanded it, rather wearisomely, in certain passages of Choruses from “The Rock” (“O Light Invisible, we praise thee!? Too bright for mortal vision”). I couldn’t find a direct ancestor, though both the noun-adjective pattern (as in God Almighty, Mary Immaculate) and the devices of grammatical parallelism are individually very frequent in religious texts.
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Struck by familiar echoes in the first stanza, I searched various liturgical texts for a source. In No Strange Land by the Catholic mystical poet and sometime London rough sleeper Francis Thompson (1859-1907), seems to me to rank among the outstanding religious verse of its kind – the hymns, prayers and chants that are its closest formal relatives. Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
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Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder