I <br />The heart you hold too small and local thing, <br />Such spacious terms of edifice to bear. <br />And yet, since Poesy first shook out her wing, <br />The mighty Love has been impalaced there; <br />That has she given him as his wide demesne, <br />And for his sceptre ample empery; <br />Against its door to knock has Beauty been <br />Content; it has its purple canopy <br />A dais for the sovereign lady spread <br />Of many a lover, who the heaven would think <br />Too low an awning for her sacred head. <br />The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink-- <br />Yet shall that chasm, till He Who these did build <br />An awful Curtius make Him, yawn unfilled. <br /> <br />II <br /> <br />O nothing, in this corporal earth of man, <br />That to the imminent heaven of his high soul <br />Responds with colour and with shadow, can <br />Lack correlated greatness. If the scroll <br />Where thoughts lie fast in spell of hieroglyph <br />Be mighty through its mighty habitants; <br />If God be in His Name; grave potence if <br />The sounds unbind of hieratic chants; <br />All's vast that vastness means. Nay, I affirm <br />Nature is whole in her least things exprest, <br />Nor know we with what scope God builds the worm. <br />Our towns are copied fragments from our breast; <br />And all man's Babylons strive but to impart <br />The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.<br /><br />Francis Thompson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-heart-two-sonnets/
