The Catholic mystic and poet Francis Thompson died of tuberculosis in 1907, and one of his best-known poems, ‘In No Strange Land’, was not published until the following year. It evokes the glory of God’s creation, which most of us cannot perceive, a theme we find in many Christian poets. The slightly earlier Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins notes that ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ and demands to know ‘Why do men then now not reck his rod?’
Hopkins links the problem with the world of work and industry: ‘And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil’. Earlier, William Blake had seen the problem in terms of conflict with a scientific view of the world, though he was optimistic about how that conflict would end:
