This section is from the book "Selected Poems Of Francis Thompson", by Francis Thompson and Wilfrid Meynell. Also available from Amazon: Selected Poems of Francis Thompson.
ON Ararat there grew a vine,
When Asia from her bathing tose;
Our first sailor made a twine
Thereof for his prefiguring brows.
Canst divine
Where, upon our dusty earth, of that vine a cluster
gròws ?
On Golgotha there grew a thorn
Round the long-prefigured Brows.
Mourn, O mourn !
For the vine have we the spine? Is this all the Heaven
allows?
On Calvary was shook a spear;
Press the point into thy heart-
Joy and f ear !
All the spines upon the thorn into curling tendrils
start.
O dismay!
I, a wingless mortai, sporting
With the tresses of the sun?
I, that dare my hand to lay
On the thunder in its snorting ?
Ere begun,
Falls my singed song down the sky, even the old Icarian
way
From the fall précipitant
Thèse dim snatches of her chant*
Only have remainèd mine;-
That from spear and thorn alone
May be grown
For the front of saint or singer an y divinìzuig twine.
Her song said that no springing
Paradise but evermore
Hangeth on a singing
That has chords of weeping,
And that sings the after-sleeping
To souls which wake too sore.
"But woe the singer, woe!" she said; "beyond the dead
his singing-lore, .
All its art of sweet and sore,
He learns, in Elenore!"
Where is the land of Luthany,
Where is the tract of Elenore?
I am bound therefore.
" Pierce thy heart to find the key;
With thee take
Only what none else would keep;
Learn to dream when thou dost wake,
Learn to wake when thou dost sleep,
Learn to water joy with tears,
Learn from fears to vanquish fears;
To hope, for thou dar'st not despair,
*The chant of the Mistress of Vision, whom, in her secret garden, the Poet has earlier described.
Exult, for that thou dar'st not grieve;
Plough thou the rock until it bear;
Know, for thou else couldst not believe;
Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive;
Die, for none other way canst live,
When earth and heaven lay down their veil,
And that apocalypse turns thee pale;
When thy seeing blindeth thee
To what thy fellow-mortals see;
When their sight to thee is sightless;
Their living, death; their light, most lightleso,
Search no more-
Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the région Elenore."
Where is the land of Luthany,
And where the région Elenore?
I do faint therefor.
" When to the new eyes of thee
All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linkèd are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star;
When thy song is shield and mirror
To the fair snake-curlèd Pain,
Where thou dar'st affront her terror
That on her thou may'st attain
Perséan conquest; seek no more,
O seek no more !
Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the région Elenore."
So sang she, so wept she,
Through a dream-night's day;
And with her magic singing kept she-
Mystical in music-
That garden of enchanting
In visionary May;
Swayless for my spirita haunting,
Thrice-threefold walled with emerald from our mortai
mornihgs grey.
 
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