Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Freeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Francis Thompson, who was an English poet and mystic who lived from 1859 to 1907.

And the poem that I'm going to read, I discovered, or at least I rediscovered, I guess.

I'd read it in college, but I hadn't read it in more than a decade since.

And I discovered this poem or rediscovered it in The Guardian through Carol Ruhman's

poem of the week column.

She did a piece on this in June of 2017.

And the poem that I'm going to read is called

In No Strange Land. It goes like this. Oh, world invisible, we view thee. Oh, world intangible,

we touch thee. Oh, 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 benumbered conceiving sores,

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 estranged faces that miss the many splendid thing.

But when so sad thou canst not sadder, cry, and upon thy so sore loss shall shine the traffic

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