All things by immortal power. Near of far, to each other linked are, that thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.

Francis Thompson (1859–1907), an English Catholic poet associated with the Decadent and late-Victorian lyric tradition, wrote frequently about divine immanence and the hidden unity of creation. This line comes from his poem “The Mistress of Vision,” first published in the 1890s, where Thompson’s speaker moves through visionary states that reveal a cosmos bound together by a single sustaining power. The poem’s imagery reflects both Thompson’s religious metaphysics and a fin-de-siècle fascination with correspondences—how the smallest earthly particulars may echo in the largest celestial order.

The couplet asserts an organic, providential interconnectedness: everything exists “by immortal power,” and all things—near or far—are linked in a web of mutual influence. The striking claim that one cannot “stir a flower without troubling of a star” compresses a metaphysical worldview into a memorable image: small actions reverberate through the whole, and the local is never merely local. Read theologically, the “immortal power” is God, whose sustaining presence binds creation into a coherent unity. More broadly, the line anticipates modern idioms of interdependence (ecological, moral, even scientific), while remaining rooted in a sacramental sense that the material world participates in a larger, unseen order.

“Thou canst not stir a flower without troubling a star.”