Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars.

These lines come from Francis Thompson’s religious poem “The Hound of Heaven” (1890s), a dramatic monologue in which the speaker recounts his attempt to flee from God’s persistent pursuit. Thompson (1859–1907), a Catholic poet who struggled with poverty, illness, and addiction, wrote the poem after a period of personal crisis and spiritual searching. The poem’s opening movement depicts the fugitive soul racing through vast, cosmic spaces—“across the margent of the world”—as if even the stars’ “gold gateways” could be disturbed by his flight. The imagery reflects late-Victorian lyric grandeur fused with intense devotional psychology.

The speaker describes an extreme, almost cosmic attempt to escape divine presence: he flees to the very “margin” of the world and even “troubles” the starry gates, suggesting frantic restlessness and the futility of flight. The “gold gateways of the stars” evokes heaven’s threshold and the ordered beauty of creation; to “trouble” them implies that the speaker’s inner turmoil disrupts even the imagined calm of the cosmos. In the larger poem, this hyperbolic escape underscores a central paradox: the more the soul runs, the more clearly it reveals its longing and the inescapability of grace. The lines dramatize spiritual resistance as both grand and ultimately self-defeating.