To love Thee human-eyed

‘Launch out into the deep,’ Christ spake of old
      To Peter: and he launched into the deep;
      Strengthened should tempest wake which lay asleep,
Strengthened to suffer heat or suffer cold.

Thus, in Christ’s Prescience: patient to behold
      A fall, a rise, a scaling Heaven’s high steep;
      Prescience of Love, which deigned to overleap
The mire of human errors manifold.

Lord, Lover of Thy Peter, and of him
   Beloved with craving of a humbled heart
      Which eighteen hundred years have satisfied;
Hath he his throne among Thy Seraphim
   Who love? or sits he on a throne apart,
      Unique, near Thee, to love Thee human-eyed?

Christina Georgina Rossetti
before 1893