“The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.”
“William Blake’s visionary transformations of London form the poem’s most important literary ancestry. In Thompson’s work more generally there’s also an occasional, probably coincidental, resemblance to Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), going beyond the shared faith to sometimes tortuous grammatical structures, vivid word-coinings, and unconventional rhythm. While Thompson’s achievements may be more modest than those of Blake or Hopkins, In No Strange Land is a poem I imagine either would have been happy to have written. A “many-splendoured” hymn, it catches more light than any of the Choruses from “The Rock”.”
How my heart sings 