His songs of Nature are:—
Sweet with wild wings that pass, that pass away.
All his wild things passed, that they might be garnered in heaven. The chase of the "Hound of Heaven" ends in a divine embrace; like that ending is the ending of all his verse.
Through the symbolism of the sun all things were brought into line. Likened to the Host, with sky for monstrance; to the Christ, with the sombre line of the horizon for Rood; to the Altar-Wafer, and signed with the Cross; the Sun is to the Earth only what Christ is to the Soul:—
Thou to thy spousal universe
Art Husband, she thy Wife and Church.
Thompson offers his inspiration—". . . to thee, O Sun,—or is't perchance, to Christ?"[47]
He would not have his harmonies mistaken for the repetition of "fair ancient flatteries." He takes the sun, at rising and at setting, as "a type memorial"[48]:—
Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood
Upon thy Western rood;
And His stained brow did vail like thine to-night,
Yet lift once more Its light,
And, risen, again departed from our ball,
But when It set on earth arose in Heaven.
And in the After-Strain:—
Even so, O Cross! thine is the victory.
Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields;
Brightness may emanate in Heaven from thee,
Here thy dread symbol only shadow yields.
Of reapèd joys thou art the heavy sheaf
Which must be lifted, though the reaper groan;
Yea, we may cry till Heaven's great ear be deaf,
But we must bear thee, and must bear alone.
Vain were a Simon; of the Antipodes
Our night not borrows the superfluous day.
Yet woe to him that from his burden flees!
Crushed in the fall of what he cast away.[49]