^
FRANCIS THOMPSON
THE PRESTON-BORN POET
(IFith Notes on some of his IVorks)
FRANCIS THOMPSON IN 1893
FRANCIS THOMPSON
THE PRESTON-BORN
POET By JOHN THOMSON
LONDON: SIMPKIN MARSHALL
HAMILTON KENT AND CO LTD
4o/c
Copyright
First Edition 1912
Second Edition 1913
<P%6F<^CS TO Fii(sr 8T>iriO^
4 M *^HE idea of this brief outline of the life and
m zuorks of Francis 'Thompson was suggested by
the erection of the commemorative tablet on
his birthplace^ and by inquiries then made con-
cerning his life and career. I am indebted to
Mr. Meynell for permission to quote from
T hompson* s poems^ to Sir Alfred Hopkinson for
information as to the poefs stay at Owens College^
and to the Rev. H. K. Mann (Newcastle-on-'Tyne),
for leave to reproduce the two photographs of
Thompson which appeared in the " Ushaw
Magazine'''' for March 1908. / am also in-
debted to the Magazine articles referred to
{particularly the " Ushaw Magazine "), and to
the prefatory note by Mr. Meynell and the
" appreciations " in the volume of Selected Poems
issued by Messrs. Burns iff Oates, Orchard
Street, London, the Poefs publishers.
JOHN THOMSON
Great Avenham Street,
Preston, September 191 2
^%SF<^cs ro s6co^T> sDrrio^
71 "TOW that the circle of Francis Thompson'' s
I 1/ readers is daily widening and the love of
his poems has a place, second o?ily to their
religion, in the hearts of thousands, there is no
need to offer an apology for an enlarged edition of
my little work on the great Poet. My special
object is to help in making Thompson better
known still, and so further his protest against the
Materialism of the age, a protest which, in
splendour and effectiveness, is absolutely unique
in English literature.
Give the world, the world. Let me see
The light of Heav''n on land and sea
Pregnant of Pow^r that was, and is,
And is to be !
I am indebted to a sister of the Poet, a lady
of " great heart and willing mind,''"' for some
particulars of the Poefs family not included in
the earlier edition.
JOHN THOMSON
Great Avenham Street,
Preston, June 1913
PART I
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
PAGB
IS
PART II
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF FRANCIS
THOMPSON'S VERSE 71
PART III
NOTES ON SOME OF FRANCIS THOMPSON'S
POEMS :
(I) THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 95
2) ODE TO THE SETTING SUN 103
(3) DAISY III
(4) IN NO STRANGE LAND 117
(Thompson's last poem)
LIST OF ILLUST-H^^riO^
FACING
PACE
FRANCIS THOMPSON IN 1893 Frontispiece
BIRTHPLACE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON 18
FRANCIS THOMPSON AT THE AGE OF FIFTEEN 26
II
Francis, thy music like a deep stream f,<Kos
From mystic heights, and mirrors as it goes
The shades and splendours of that prismy peak
Where poet-dreamers dwell, and tireless seek
Strains most adequate ; and thy song is Jed
By cyclic hauntings from the cliffs of dread
Thou perforce clomb, a wider world to scan.
And catch lost echoes of the Pipes of Pan.
From other sounds aloof thy message rolls.
And men must hearken for it draws their souls :
Now thrills with awe, and now with such sweet stress
As linketh heart to heart in tenderness
By dire compellings, none save those may wield.
Whose birth-fused breath is fashioned for the yield —
Who reach the crovmed gates, and entrance gain
To highest Heaven, through the Arch of Paiii !
J. T.
M
posr ^:ht> mystic
Pass the gates of Luthany^
Tread the region Eknore.
Go, songs, Jor ended is our brief, sweet flay ;
Go, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow :
And some are sung, and that was yesterday.
And some unsung, and that may he to-morrow.
Go forth ; and if it be o'er stony way.
Old joy can lend what viewer grief must borrow :
And it was szueet, and that was yesterday.
And sweet is sweet, though purchased zvith sorrow.
F. Thompson
i6
POST ^3^ MYSTIC
FRANCIS THOMPSON, poet and
mystic, " master of the lordly line, the
daring image, and the lyric's lilt," was
born at Preston, on the i8th December 1859,
in the house numbered 7 Winckley Street,
now used as a solicitor's office. He was
baptized at St. Ignatius' Church, in that
town, on the 20th of the same month. His
full name, as it appears on the register of
births, is Francis Joseph Thompson ; but his
first published poem having been signed
" Francis Thompson," it was thought advis-
able that he should (as he ever afterwards
did) adhere to the shorter form. The com-
memorative tablet placed, on the loth August
1910, over the doorway of the house where
the poet first saw the light, gives his name
in full. The tablet is the gift of Mrs.
Catherine Holiday, of Hawkshead (formerly
of Preston), and it is a sadly curious fact
that, only after many inquiries, could the
exact birthplace of one destined " down the
annals of fame to carry a name immortal "
— the greatest of his proud town's sons — be
found.
17
The poet's father was Charles Thompson, a
homoeopathic doctor of some note — a man
(according to a writer in the Church Times *)
firm and kind, but somewhat austere, and with
no poetic instinct ; his mother, Mary Turner
Thompson, formerly Morton. Both parents
were Catholics, and converts from Anglicanism
some years before their marriage. Francis was
the second of the five children, all of whom
were born in Preston. Two babies, Charles
Joseph, the first-born (who only lived a day),
and Helen Mary, the fourth, are buried there.
Such literary traditions as descended to our
poet would seem to have come through a
paternal uncle, Edward Healy Thompson, who
rose to some distinction, and is still remembered,
by his religious writings.
Dr. Thompson appears to have lived in
several houses in Preston — the one in Winckley
Street, already mentioned ; before that (prob-
ably from 1856 to 1858) at 12 St. Ignatius'
Square ; and after the birth of Francis, first in
Winckley Square, and later in Latham Street.
Two of the doctor's children were born at the
house in Winckley Square (No. 3 3 a) — one in
1 861, the other in 1862. It was whilst residing
* April 21, 1911.
18
BIRTHPLACE OF^ FRANCIS THOMPSON
7WINCKLEY STREET, PRESTON
in Latham Street, in 1864, that his daughter
Helen Mary died, and his fifth child was
born. The doctor's removal to Ashton-
under-Lyne towards the end of 1864, while
his three surviving children were so young,
will no doubt account for that town being
sometimes given as the poet's birthplace.*
Dr. Thompson (who had married again,
after the death of his first wife in 1880, and
left one child of the second marriage), died
in 1896.
Young Francis was sent, on the 22nd of ^^^
September 1870, to Ushaw College, nearfy*"^
Durham, well known at that time for its^ —
literary associations with Lingard and Wise-
man, and later, with Lafcadio Hearn. His
education up to this had been at home, at the
hands of his mother and the family governess.
It was his parents' wish that his college/'
studies should be such as to fit him for thel
priesthood, or, failing a vocation, such as would)
be of assistance in the father's profession of I
medicine : and instructions were given accord- I
ingly to the college authorities. Our youthful
* Even the Ushaw Magazine (March 1908) refers to
Francis Thompson, " born at Ashton-under-Lyne" etc.
Another town which has been accorded the honour of the
poet's birth is Boston !
B 19
student soon evinced a remarkable love of books,
and being specially indulged by his masters' in
his taste for the reading of the classics, he early-
distinguished himself in such subjects as their
ample reading would naturally improve. Most
of his leisure hours were spent in the well-
stocked libraries, sometimes, in his seminary
days, behind a barrier of books erected as a
protection from the " attentions " (catapults,
bullets of paper, and the like) of his class-mates.
He was not strong enough to take much part in
the college games, and only in the racquet
courts, at handball, did he attain a proficiency
above the average. His companions relate
that he was extremely fond of watching, and
was accounted a good judge of. Cricket. In-
deed, the " sunlit pitch " had a fascination for
him which he never lost. Towards the end of
his life he knew all the famous scores of the
preceding quarter of a century : after his death,
the averages of his cricket heroes, for over
thirty years, most carefully compiled, were
found among his papers, and with them some
verses on the absorbing game, in which the
names of Hornby and Barlow appear. The
verses, trivial and probably never intended for
print, end :
20
"POST (t^^N^'Z) ^SMTSriC
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron
folk,
Though my own red roses there may
blow ;
It is little I re-pair to the matches of the Southron
folk.
Though the red roses crest the caps I
know.
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy
coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a
ghost :
And I look through my tears on a soundless,
clapping host.
As the run- stealers flicker to and fro.
To and fro,
O my Hornby and my Barlow, long ago.
The lines are not dated, but seem to have
been called forth by an incident which
occurred not long before the poet's death.
It would appear that he had been invited
to Lord's to see Middlesex and Lancashire,
and had agreed to go ; but as the time
for the match drew near, the sad memories
of bygone days became too much for him.
The pathetic interest of a composition so
21
reminiscent of the " long ago " will be un-
derstood by those who know what it is to
miss their favourite faces from the field of
sport. It may be mentioned in passing, that
Thompson wrote a lengthy criticism of " The
Jubilee Book of Cricket " in the Academy
— a criticism full of Cricket acumen.
"\ Whilst at Ushaw, Thompson wrote a number
of verses, some of which are still in the posses-
sion of the college authorities, or of college
companions. In more than one, the quaint,
spelling and love of the older words which
marked his later works are noticeable. It
must be for others to say how far these
early efforts exhibit the buddings of that
exuberant genius, which was afterwards to
display itself so wonderfully. Five such
poems, " Lamente forre Stephanon," " Song
of the Neglected Poet," " Finchale," "Dirge
of Douglas," " A Song of Homildon," are
given in full in the Ushaw Magazine for
March 1908. "The Song of the Neglected
Poet," by its very title, cannot fail to ex-
cite interest among Thompson lovers. Its
theme is the praise of poesy : the first three
verses run :
22
"POST <^^T> .^rsric
Still, be still zuithin my breast, thou ever, ever
wailing heart ;
Hush, O hush within my bosom, beating,
beating heart of mine I
Lay aside thy useless grief, and brood fiot o^er thy
aching smart.
Wherefore but for sick hearts'* healing, came
down poesy divine ?
Mourn not, soul, o^er hopes departed, efforts spent,
and spent in vain ;
On a glorious strife we entered, and ^twasfor a
priceless stake ;
Well "'twas foughten, well we'^ve struggled, and,
thd' all our hopes are slain,
Tet, my soul, we have a treasure not the banded
world can take.
Poesy, that glorious treasure I Poesy my own for
(?Vr /
Mine and thine, my soul, for ever, ours though
all else may be gone ;
Like the sun it shone upon us when our life began
so fair.
Like the moon it stays to cheer us nozv our night
is almost done.
23
The " Dirge of Douglas " has a martial ring :
Let no ruthful burying song
Lament the Earl of Douglas,
But let his 'praises loud and long
Echo the rocks and hills among.
Poured from the lips of warriors strong,
The doughty Earl of Douglas !
*****
Bear him to his grave with a warlike pace.
Sing no sad requiem o^er him ;
The mightiest he of all his race.
He is gone, and none can fill his place !
Let the champion lie in his warrior^ s grace
Where his forefathers lay before him.
The " Song of Homildon " is a mere frag-
ment :
"Now every man from hill and plain
Follow the banner of Percy ;
Far into Northumberland, trampling o^er slain,
The doughty Earl Douglas hath forayed amain,
And scorneth all ruth or mercy.
Hotspur hath girded his harness on.
And plucked his sword from the scabbard ;
He led his army to Homildoii,
There, e^er the ruddy moon be done,
The lion must yield to the libbard.
H
"POST ^^T> rMTSTIC
Neither in arithmetic, nor later in mathe-
matics, was the young poet a success. Indeed,
at the end of his college career, he had fallen
to the last place in mathematical subjects.
But in English and essay-writing he was often
the first, both at seminary and college. On
five only out of the twenty-one occasions in his
seminary days when examinations in essay-
writing were held, did he fail to secure the top ■
place. From these early compositions, many
of which are still in existence, it would appear
that battles and sieges were the favourite
subjects in prose of the shy and gentle youth
whose own battle of life was destined to
be singularly severe and prolonged. One of
his essays, " The Storming of the Bridge of
Lodi," written for a speaker at the debat-
ing club in 1874 (^^^ 7^^^ Francis passed
from seminary into college proper), evoked
considerable enthusiasm among his com-
panions.
The seven years spent by Thompson at
Ushaw stamped his after-life deeply with its
religious atmosphere. He was orthodox through
and through, " from within, from beneath,
outward to his acts, upward to his poetry."
Though it was not his lot to receive a call to
25
the priesthood, his verses are, oftener than any
other poet's, vestment-clad and odorous of the
incense of the sanctuary. If, as has been said
by one, his poetry is spiritual even to a fault, it
must be a " fault " the glory, doubtless, of his
Alma Mater !
It was after our poet left Ushaw (whose
peaceful groves he never revisited), that the
clouds of his life began to gather. He returned
to his home (Stamford Street, Ashton-under-
Lyne) in July 1877, and was sent, in October of
the same year, to Owens College, Manchester,
to study medicine. Thus much is known that
the subject was entirely distasteful to him, and
that, though he distinguished himself in Greek
in a preliminary examination, he did not
devote himself to the reading necessary for the
profession which it was now intended he should
follow : like Keats in his hospital- walking days,
he was more engrossed by volumes of poetry
than by treatises on anatomy. The " Halls of
Medicine " saw him but seldom : it was in
the public libraries of Manchester, with his
favourite authors, the poets, that he spent
most of his days. His passion for cricket led
him often, at this time, to Old Trafford,
among the great matches which he witnessed
26
FRANCIS THOMPSON AF THE AGIC OP^ FU-THKN
there being the historic meeting of Lancashire
and Gloucestershire on July 25, 26, and zy,
1878.
Thompson spent nearly eight years at Owens
College. Among those contemporary with
him are many names of eminence : Professor
W. Thorburn, Dr. E. S. Reynolds, Dr. Robert
Maguire, Dr. Leopold Larmuth, and the late
Dr. Thomas Harris, among the rest. But
Thompson as a medical student was a misfit,
for his hopes of healing lay elsewhere than
in the consulting-room, as his " Song of the
Neglected Poet," already quoted, shows.
The graceful memorial recently (July 191 2)
affixed in Manchester University to Thomp-
son's memory as a student at Owens College
bears some sad lines (taken from his " Ode
to the Setting Sun "), which may serve to in-
dicate the sense of disappointment haunting
his life at the period of closing his medical
studies :
Whatso looks lovelily
Is but the rainbozv on lifers weeping rain.
Why have we longings of immortal pain,
And all we long for mortal P Woe is me.
And all our chants hut chaplet some decay
As mine this vanishing — nay vanished day.
27
/
He does not seem ever to have concealed his
mode of living at Manchester, or his repugnance
to the profession selected for him, and in the
end, the student whose heart v^^as set on the
construction of sentences rather than that of
the human body, had to listen to the reproaches
of an angry parent. There was a terrible scene
between father and son. Still unwilling to
pursue his medical studies, and fearful of
another such meeting, the young man tried to
enlist for a soldier, but being refused for want
of the requisite chest-measurement, abruptly
fled from home. In the ordinary course he
would have spent the summer vacation of that
year (1885) away from home with his father ;
but it was shortly before the vacation — in the
July of 1885 — that the break, which was to
bring such sad consequences in its train, came.
Francis seems to have left with little in his
pocket, and walked by many a devious way, until
he arrived, in search of a living, in London. In
the words of Mr. Mcynell : '' Like De Quincey
he went to London, and knew Oxford Street
for a stony-hearted stepmother." Arrived in
the great city, without means and without any
prospects before him, his life's tragedy began.
Like Shakespeare in his early London days, it
28
was only by accepting "mean employment"
that Thompson kept his soul in his body.
He worked for a while as an assistant in a
boot-shop near Leicester Square. " Are you
saved ? " he had been asked one day in the
street by a man pitying his plight. " What
right have you to ask ? " returned the poor
youth. The questioner, persisting in his good
intentions, answered quietly, " Well, never
mind about your soul. Your body is in a bad
way. If you want work, come to me." And
so the young poet became a handy boy in a
boot-shop ! Later, he got work as a " col-
lector " for a bookseller, for whom he had to
haul heavy sacks through the streets. But
days there were when no employment of any
kind could be had, and the homeless night
followed perforce the hungry day. Those who
see in Thompson's poem, " The Hound of
Heaven," a narration of his own experiences,
will find many a passage which may have been
suggested by this period :
In the rash lustihead of my young fozvers,
I shook the -pillaring hours
And fulled my life upon me ; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years —
29
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke^
Have puffed and hurst as sun- starts on a stream.
* % # # «
Ah I must —
Designer Infinite ! —
Ah ! must Thou char the wood ere 'Thou canst
limn with it ?
* * * * *
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.
* * * * *
Lines such as these tell their own story of the
years " with heavy griefs so overplussed."
Thompson was never physically strong. He
had been afflicted with a nervous breakdown
before leaving Manchester, from the effects of
which he never recovered. His life in London,
before his " discovery " in 1888, cut off from
home, and without a friend, must have been
terrible. At times utterly destitute, at others
glad to earn a trifling sum by any odd job
(selling matches and the like) that chance
threw in his way, his home perchance a railway
arch or bench in the Park — oppressed, too, by
the thoughts of filial duty unfulfilled, it is no
wonder that he should have sought the attrac-
tions of laudanum (whose wiles he learned
30
'POST ftA^KT) ^MYSTIC
whilst a student of medicine) to bring some
measure of relief. It is related that on one occa-
sion in his darkest-days he was so strongly tempted
to self-destruction that he only escaped the
tempter by some mysterious, unseen interven-
tion, and that the heaven of which he writes :
^hort arm needs man to reach to heaven.
So ready is heaven to stoop to him ;
did indeed stoop down to save him, by dashing \^
away the poison he had intended, in a fit of
despair, to take.
There is a touching incident (again recalling
De Quincey) recorded in his own matchless
way in his volume of " Sister Songs " (A Child's
Kiss) which must have occurred in this " night-
mare " time :
Once, bright Sylviola / in days not far,
Once — in that nightmare-time which still
doth haunt
My dreams, a grim, unbidden visitant —
Forlorn, and faint, and stark,
I had endured through watches of the dark
The abashless inquisition of each star.
Tea, was the outcast mark
Of all those heavenly passers'' scrutiny ;
Stood bound and helplessly
3J
For 'Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me ;
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
In nighfs slow-wheeled car :
Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength,
I waited the inevitable last.
Then there came fast
A child ; like thee, a Spring flower ; hut a flower
Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,
And through the city streets blown withering.
She passed, — O brave, sad, lovingest, tender
thing ! —
And of her own scant pittance did she give.
That I might eat and live :
Thenjied, a swift and trackless fugitive.
To what extent our poet's wedding with
poverty fashioned an offspring in his poems
will be for his biographer to^note. The maga-
zine to which Thompson sent his first accepted
piece was Merry England. It has been stated
that Thompson heard of the existence of this
magazine through the late Bishop (then Canon)
Carroll, who, meeting him in London, had
determined to do what he could to help him in
his work, and wrote to tell him of the possi-
bilities which the magazine offered. For a
32
"POST (L^^D .^rsric
couple of years the poor poet had been sending
verses, written on scraps of paper picked up in
the streets, to impatient editors — but without
result. To the magazine mentioned he sent,
some time late in 1888, in hopelessly unpre-
sentable manuscript, a poem (said to be
" Dream Tryst ") which has been described as
" one of the brightest lights of his genius." The
brilliancy of the verse-set gems was recognized
by the editor, Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, and the
poem and its acceptance became the turning-
point in the poet's career, at a time when all
hope seemed gone. The tender-hearted editor,
not content with publishing the verses, deter-
mined to find and assist their author. The
address — " Post Office, Charing Cross " — given
on the manuscript afforded but little clue
however, and the search for the vagrant poet,
then in the most pitiable state after his three
years and more of London vagrancy and months
of appalling suffering, was a long one. The
chemist in Drury Lane from whom Thompson
procured the drug which he used to ease his
" human smart " was consulted — and in the
end the poet was traced to his lodging, to be
rescued when everything seemed utterly lost.
Won over by the sympathy of both Mr. and
33
Mrs. Meynell, he agreed to place himself under
their care. He was received temporarily into
their home, and made the friend of their
children. Canon Carroll, who had, years be-
fore, made efforts on behalf of the poet's
family to trace the missing youth in the crowd
of London's submerged tenth, now became
the intermediary between Thompson and his
father, and had the happiness of finding his
efforts to bring about a reconciliation success-
ful. By his manly tenderness in doing all that
was possible to heal the scars of the wanderer,
the Canon so won the poet's heart that (as
told by one who knew both poet and prelate
intimately) the attitude of the one to the other
was thenceforth that of " a little child at his
father's knee." After being medically treated
and carefully nursed, Thompson lived for nearly
two years in the Premonstratensian monastery
at Storrington, in Sussex.
It is to Mr. Meynell's son (Mr. Everard
Meynell) that the literary world will have to
look, in his forthcoming biography of the poet,
for many particulars of the poet's inner life :
and it is not strange that the children of the
Meynell family became the subject of some of
Thompson's finest verses. To their mother,
34
POST e^^D .EMTSTIC
Mrs. Meynell * (the gifted poetess eulogized
by Ruskin), he dedicated the group of poems,
" Love In Dian's Lap," besides many other
charming pieces. To Mr. Meynell himself,
under the Initials " VV. M.," he addressed the
touching lines :
O tree of many branches ! One thou hast
Thou barest not, hut grafted'' st on thee. Now, •
Should all men's thunders break on thee, and leave j
Thee reft of bough and blossom, that one branch
Shall cling to thee, my Father, Brother, Friend^
Shall cling to thee, until the end of end I
Of Storrington, Mr. Meynell, In his bio-
graphical note prefaced to the volume of
" Selected Poems," states : " That beautiful
Sussex village has now its fixed place on the
map of English literature. For there It was
that Francis Thompson discovered his possi-
bilities as a poet." From thenceforth (Novem-
ber 1888) until about 1897, when he took
mainly to the writing of prose, Thompson
soared higher and higher in his poetic flights,
while his fame steadily grew. If his works are
* An interesting estimate and review of the poetry of
Mrs. Meynell " to-day sole queen of poetry in this land " —
with special reference to the poetry of Francis Thompson-
appeared in the British Review of March 191 3.
c 35
not yet as widely known as certain lesser
writers', it is partly because Thompson is the
poets' poet, and partly because, as an article in
the Ushaw Magazine puts it, verses such as
his, by their deep symbolism and old-time
words, " are by their very character slow-
footed travellers. They will journey far, but
they must have time."
The first volume of Thompson's Poems,
which appeared in November 1893, under the
simple title, " Poems,"* attracted attention
immediately. Referring to the section '* Love
in Dian's Lap," Canon Yates writes : " Was
woman ever more exquisitely sung ? I do not
know in the whole realm of English poetry a
more noble tribute to noble womanhood." Of
one of the longer pieces, " The Hound of
Heaven," in another section, the critics did not
hesitate to say that it seemed to be, on the
whole, the most wonderful lyric in the language,
the author a Crashaw cast in a diviner mould —
a worthy disciple of Dante — a companion of
Cowley — the equal of Shelley. A foremost
criticf summed it up as " the return of the
nineteenth century to Thomas a Kempis." It
delighted men of such diverse minds as Sir
* Dedicated to Mr. and Mrs. MeyneU.
t J. L. Garvin.
36
"POST e^^Z) ^MTSTIC
Edward Burne-Jones and Mr. Coventry Pat-
more ; the Bishop of London (who pronounced
it " one of the most tremendous poems ever
written ") ; and the Rev. R. J. Campbell, the
Nonconformist divine. Grave and learned
priests quoted it in their sermons ; scholars and
literary men in every walk of life learnt it by
heart ; the T^imes emphatically declared that
men will still be learning it 200 years hence !
Considered by most authorities to be
Thompson's masterpiece, " The Hound of
Heaven " abounds in gems of artistic trope
and poetic imagery. It is doubtful if any
more impressively beautiful gallery of pictures,
contained in the space of less than two hundred
lines, has been seen in modern days. The
subject-matter — God's pursuit and conquest of
the resisting soul that would find its satisfaction
elsewhere than in Him (God being symbolized
as the Hound) — is described, to borrow the
words of Patmore, " in a torrent of as humanly-
expressive verse as was ever inspired by a
natural affection."
Of the poems in the first volume it will
suffice to quote J. L. Garvin in The Bookman :
" A volume of poetry has not appeared in
Queen Victoria's reign more authentic in
greatness of utterance than this. ... It is
37
perfectly safe to affirm that if Mr. Thompson
wrote no other line, by this volume alone he is
as secure of remembrance as any poet of the
century. . . . Mr. Thompson's first volume
is no mere promise — it is itself among the great
achievements of English poetry ; it has reached
the peak of Parnassus at a bound."
The volume entitled " Sister Songs," dedi-
cated to Monica and Madeline Meynell (whose
names are thus immortalized), appeared in 1895.
It is the most autobiographical of Thompson's
volumes. Included in it is a poem (the " Poet
and Anchorite " of " Selected Poems ") which
contains some lines memorable by their special
insight into the poet's inner self :
Love anci love's beauty only hold, their revels
In life''s familiar, penetrable levels :
What of its ocean-floor P
I dwell there evermore.
From almost earliest youth
I raised the lids 0' the truth.
And forced her bend on me her shrinking sight —
It was from stern truth, then, that the Prodigal
of Song learned his Art !
" Sister Songs " is described by Mr. Archer
as " a book which Shelley would have adored."
The Times says it contains passages which
38
TOST <^^T> ^MTSTIC
Spenser would not have disowned. To quote
the latter more fully : " Thompson used his
large vocabulary with a boldness — and especially
a recklessness, almost a frivolity in rhyme —
that were worthy of Browning. On the other
hand, these rugged points were, at a further
view, absorbed into the total effect of beauty
in a manner which Browning never achieved.
. . . These ' Sister Songs,' written in praise of
two little sisters, contain a number of lovely
and most musical lines, and some passages —
such as the seventh section of the first poem —
which Spenser would not have disowned."
The New Age summed up its estimate :
" We have not in the English tongue a
volume more entirely packed with unalloyed
poetry."
The last volume of verse (1897) entitled
" New Poems " * bears the same high mark
of genius, winning the highest praise from the
critics and reviewers. Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch
(" Q ") sums up his estimate of " The Mistress
of Vision " : " It is verily a wonderful poem ;
hung, like a fairy-tale, in middle air — a sleeping
palace of beauty set in a glade in the heart of
the woods of Westermain, surprised there and
recognized with a gasp as satisfying, and
* Dedicated to Coventry Patmore.
39
summarizing a thousand youthful longings
after beauty."
Maud Diver in her novel " Candles in the
Wind " has many fine things to say of Thomp-
son's third volume. One passage only (given
purposely without reference to the particular
character to which it refers) must suffice to
show something of the novelist's appreciation :
During the process [of reading " New Poems "]
murmurs of admiration broke from him. He was
poet enough to recognize in this new singer a star
of the first magnitude ; and there, while the
pageant in the west flamed and died, he read that
regal " Ode to the letting Sun,'''* which is, in
itself, a pageant of colour and sound ; a deathless
vindication of DeatWs fruition. Then, eager for
more, he passed on to " The Anthem of Earth^"*
surrendering his soul to the onrush of its majestical
cadences ; reading and re-reading, with an
exalted thrill, certain lines, doubly pencilled, that
echoed in his brain for days.
*****
At the end of an hour he sat there still — in a
changed world ; a world no less stern and silent,
yet mysteriously softened and spiritualized as if
by the brush of a consummate artist.
To the poems in the third volume, more than
40
TOST ^sx!^ .^rsric
the rest, Thompson owes his title of a mystic.
Included in the group " Sight and Insight "
are to be found what are perhaps his most
mystical pieces : " The Mistress of Vision,"
"The Dread of Height," "Orient Ode,"
"From the Night of Forebeing," "Any
Saint," " Assumpta Maria," and " Grace of
the Way " — all full of lofty grandeur combined
■with rapturous fervour and a liturgical splen-
dour and spiritual insight not to be found in
any other of the long line of English singers.
" The Selected Poems of Francis Thomp-
son," with the biographical note by Mr.
Meynell before referred to, and a portrait of
the poet in his nineteenth year, was issued in
1908. The selection, about fifty pieces in all,
gives us of Thompson's best, and should serve
to bring the larger works, from which they
have been admirably chosen, before a wide
circle of readers. The poems on children
rightly take the first place ; of the one entitled
" Ex Ore Infantium " (a Christmastide hymn
which appeared originally in Franciscan
Annals) y it is but sober truth to say that
nothing so tenderly devotional, and yet so
daringly unconventional, has ever before been
put into language of such simple power. The
41
volume contains several of the greater poems in
full, including " The Hound of Heaven," the
" Ode to the Setting Sun," the " Orient Ode,"
and " Any Saint " (a partly direct, partly
mystical poem, of special significance) ; extracts
from the " Mistress of Vision," the " Victorian
Ode " (written for Queen Victoria's Diamond
Jubilee), " The Anthem of Earth," " Assumpta
Maria," and others of the longer works ; the
whole of " Daisy," " July Fugitive," " Dream
Tryst," " Contemplation," and other poems,
besides a number of simpler pieces — the Violets
of Thompson's Garden of Poesy. The selection
includes also the lines " In no Strange Land,"
found among the poet's papers after his death,
and which are remarkable for their striking
epitome of his teaching and final message. The
patriotic " Victorian Ode," to be found in full
in " New Poems " and written for one of the
great dailies (the Daily Chronicle, if one
mistakes not), was considered by many to be
the best of the Diamond Jubilee Odes.
Another and perhaps more famous ode is the
one on Cecil Rhodes which Thompson wrote
for the Academy, at the special request of the
editor, Mr. Lewis Hind, and produced in less
than three days — an example of rapidity in
42
" unpremeditated art " that must surely be
imique. Mr. Hind said of it : "I am prouder
of having published that ode than anything
else that the Academy ever contained." Before
the poem was a few weeks old, it was quoted
on every side : one passage in particular struck
the public fancy :
From the Zambesi to the Limpopo
He the many-languaged land
Took with his large compacting hand
And pressed into a nation
* * * * *■
An ode for the centenary of Ushaw College, in
1908, had been promised by the poet, but he did
not live to do more th an sketch a few rough notes
of the form he had intended it should take.
Francis Thompson is not a poet with whom
the multitudes of the reading public are as yet
familiar, and even in his native town there are
many to whom his name is still unknown. He
ranks, nevertheless, as one of the few really
great poetic geniuses and writers of his century,
though his position cannot be definitely assigned
until the world has had time to take more
careful stock of his treasures, and had leisure to
consider the full store of his literary output.
43
For Thompson was not only a poet, but in his
later years a writer of prose as sonorous and
wellnigh as remarkable as his poems. Genius,
like nature, would appear to abhor a vacuum ;
in our poet's case the years following 1897 may
be described as his post-poetic period, a period
which produced his great prose works and the
many valuable reviews on Theology, History,
Biography, and Travel which he contributed
to the leading periodicals, and which are now
being recovered, as was inevitable, from their
files. The prose works which have been
published separately up to the present are his
*' Health and Holiness ; or, A Study of the
Relations between Brother Ass, the Body, and
his Rider, the Soul " (described as an admirable
scholastic essay, in heroic prose), and his works
on Shelley, on St. Ignatius of Loyola, and
St. John Baptist de la Salle.* The essay on
* The collected works of Francis Thompson have just
(June 1 91 3) been issued in three volumes. Vols, i and ii
comprise " Poems," " Sister Songs," " New Poems," and
a large number of poems for the first time gathered
together. Vol. iii consists of the " Shelley " and " Health
and Holiness " essays, besides a number of new creative
papers, and a selection from Thompson's literary and critical
articles. Aboutone-fourthof the poetry is stated to be new to
book-form. It is interesting to note that the " Life of Francis
Thompson," by Mr. Everard Meynell, so eagerly looked forward
to, is now definitely announced for September 191 3.
44
"POST e^5\CT) ^MTsric
Shelley was pronounced by Mr. George Wynd-
ham to be " the most important contribution
to pure letters written in English during the
last twenty years." This now world-famous
essay is not the longest, but it is undoubtedly
the most brilliant of Thompson's prose works
and the most exhausting of his efforts. Its
history is remarkable. Written, as it was, at
the request of Bishop (afterwards Cardinal)
Vaughan for the Dublin Review, which the
Bishop owned but did not edit, it was
refused acceptance by the editor, to be there-
upon thrown aside by the discouraged author.
Mr. Meynell, Thompson's literary executor,
found it among the poet's papers at his death
nineteen years later, and thinking it right that
the Review for which it was originally intended
should still have the offer of it, since a new
generation of readers and another editor had
arisen, again sent it up to the Dublin Review —
this time to be accepted. " Thus " (to quote
Mr. Meynell himself) " it happened that this
orphan among essays entered at last on a full
inheritance of fame. Appreciative readers
rapidly spread its renown beyond their own
orthodox ranks ; and, for the first time in a
long life of seventy-two years, the Dublin
45
Review passed into a second edition. That
also was soon exhausted, but not the further
demand, which the separate issue is designed
to meet." For " The Life of St. Ignatius of
Loyola," which with the essay on Shelley must
ever remain the chief memorials to his power as
a prose-writer, original research was, of course,
impossible, but, as stated in Fr. Pollen's
editorial note, the author brought to his work
the sympathy of genius with genius, and had
almost a contemporary's afhnity with the age
in which the Saint lived. The Rev. Dr. Barry,
himself a distinguished writer, says of it : " It
is a portrait from life, not a copy. . . . While
we read these lines the founder of the great
Company stands before us in his habit as he
lived." And again : " I hold that our dead
poet has written a Life exact in statement,
beautiful in point of style. ... It is a notable
addition, if we ought not rather to call it the
beginning of a true English literature, in its
own department." In an interesting passage
in the Life, the Saint is compared with John
Wesley, whose lives, though so unlike out-
wardly, had much of similarity below the
surface.
" The Life of St. John Baptist de la Salle," a
46
<P0S7' <^,9CD ^MTSriC
shorter work, presents the Hfe of the Founder
of the Christian Brothers with singular fehcity,
and contains in the closing chapter a brilliant
epigrammatic defence of the Church's cham-
pionship of free education, in which Thompson,
as a prose writer, is seen at his best.
# * * * *
A seventeenth-century poet, born in the
nineteenth, bringing with him the solace of
old-time melody — melody like unto the richest
strains of Crashaw and Cowley — Francis
Thompson depends mainly on his poetical
works for his place among the literary giants of
his age. His poems are among the glories of
our literature. They have fashioned for them-
selves thrones in the hearts of many to whom
the charms of verse had never appealed before :
their deep faith in the intimate presence of
God has been an inspiration and spiritual tonic
to innumerable souls.
Writing of her husband, in the year 1893,
Lady Burne- Jones mentions that the winter of
that year was cheered by the appearance of a
small volume of poems by Francis Thompson,
whose name was, till then, unknown to them.
The book moved Sir Edward to admiration and
hope, and she tells that, speaking of " The
47
Hound of Heaven," he said : " Since Gabriel's
' Blessed Damozel ' no mystical words have so
touched me as ' The Hound of Heaven.'
Shall I ever forget how I undressed and dressed
again, and had to undress again — a thing I
most hate — because I could think of nothing
else ? "
And thousands more have drawn encourage-
ment and hope, not only from " The Hound of
Heaven," but from many another of Francis
Thompson's poems. Never, surely, was woman
worshipped with such utter chastity.
" Where," asks Mr. Traill in ^he Ningteenth
Century, " unless perhaps here and there in a
sonnet of Rossetti's, has this sort of sublimated
enthusiasm for the bodily and spiritual beauty
of womanhood found such expression between
the age of the Stuarts and our own ? "
Thompson is above all the poet of celestial
vision. His poetry answers to the full Shelley's
description of the function of poetry in general ;
it " redeems from decay the visitations of the
divinity in man." In no other great poet of
the nineteenth century are these visitations
more frequent or more splendid. The inten-
sity of his mysticism — the glow and fervour of
his verse — his rapturous communings, seem to
48
^OST <^^NZD ^MYSTIC
have " fired " the very critics. The extracts
appended, taken at random from a number of
their appreciations, will serve to exhibit the
unprecedented enthusiasm which the poet's
lines exercised :
One has seldom seen -poet more wildly abandoned
to his rapture, more absorbed in the trance of his
ecstasy. When the irresistible moment comes, he
throws himself upon his mood as a glad swimmer
gives himself to the waves, careless whither the
strong tide carries him, knowing only the wild joy
of the laughing waters and the rainbow spray.
He shouts, as it were, for mere gladness, in the
welter of wonderful words, and he dives swift and
fearless to fetch his deep-sea fancies. — R. Le
Gallienne, in 'The Daily Chronicle.
Here are dominion — dominion over language,
and a sincerity as of Robert Burns. . . . In our
opinion, Mr. T hompson* s poetry at its highest
attains a sublimity unsurpassed by any Victorian
poet. — The speaker.
To read Mr. Francis T hompson^ s poems is like
setting sail with Drake or Hawkins in search cf
new worlds and golde?i spoils. He has the
magnificent Elizabethan manner, the splendour of
conception, the largeness of imagery. — Katharine
Tynan-Hinkson, in The Bookman.
49
He swung a rare incense in a censer of gold,
under the vault of a chapel where he had hung
votive offerings. When he chanted in his chapel
of dreams, the airs were often airs which he had
learnt from Crashaw and from Paimore. 'They
came to life again when he used them, and he
made for himself a music which was part strangely
familiar and part his own, almost b e wilder ingly.
Such reed-notes and such orchestration of sound
were heard nowhere else ; and people listened to
the music, entranced as by a new magic. The
genius of Francis Thompson was Oriental,
exuberant in colour, woven into elaborate patterns,
and went draped in old silk robes, that had
survived many dynasties. The spectacle of him
was an enchantment ; he passed like a wild
vagabond of the mind, dazzling our sight. —
Arthur Symons, in The Saturday Review.
In Francis T hompson* s poetry, as in the poetry
of the universe, you can work infinitely out and
out, but yet infinitely in and in. These two
infinities are the mark of greatness ; and he was
a great poet. — G. K. Chesterton, in The
Illustrated London News.
We find that in these poems profound thought,
far-fetched splendour of imagery, and nimble-
witted discernment of those analogies which are
50
^06T zAD^cj) ^mrsric
the roots of the -poet's language^ abound . . .
qualities which ought to place him in the
permanent ranks of fame, with Cowley and with
Crashaw. — Coventry Patmore, in The Fort-
fiightly Review.
The regal airs, the prophetic ardours, the
apocalyptic vision, the supreme utterance — he has
them all. — The Bookman.
*****
The later years of Thompson's Hfe seem to
have been uneventful save for his writings, and
for an incident in 1888, and another in 1897,
either of which might have ended disastrously.
Whilst at Storrington it was his custom to
spend long hours in walks out of doors. On
one of these walks, shortly after his arrival at
the Monastery in November 1888, he got lost
in a fog on the Downs, and was in a state of
exhaustion when found. On the second occa-
sion (some time in 1897), whilst in apartments
in London, he had been smoking in bed, and
having fallen asleep, awoke to find himself
surrounded with flames. He jumped up,
fortunately in time to enable him to escape
without more damage to himself than the
wrath which his irate landlady poured, justly
enough, upon his head.
D 51
He stayed for some months In 1892 near to
the Franciscan Monastery at Pantasapli in
North Wales — and, returning to Pantasaph in
1893, lived there continuously until late in
1896 — a period marking with its close practi-
cally the end of his greater poetical work. He
did not live at the monastery (as has been
stated elsewhere), but spent a good deal of
time within its walls. His relations with the
Friars were always cordial. Fr. Anselm, then
the editor of Franciscan Annals^ and now
Archbishop of Simla, became the poet's close
friend. Except for a few days which he may
have spent at the monastery pending suitable
lodgings being found outside, Thompson lived
in hired apartments in the little Welsh village,
iirst with a family of working people, and later
at the post office. Here, and in the monastic
grounds — away from " the madding crowd " —
he wrote some of his best work, including, from
materials partly gathered in London and partly
in the monastery library, a considerable por-
tion of the prose life of St. Ignatius of Loyola,
published after his death. Much of his verse
is richly stained with the local colouring of the
neighbourhood, and without doubt much of
the exalted mystical thought which charac-
52
'POST ^^NiT> ^MTSriC
terizes " New Poems " must have sprung from
the religious atmosphere of Pantasaph, coupled
with the poet's familiar intercourse with the
Friars, and his visits to the neighbouring shrine
at Holywell. The Welsh peasants of the
district became, in time, quite accustomed to
the poet's strange figure as he flitted ghost-
like (as was his habit) among their mountain
homesteads in the shades of the gathering
night. With the Sons of the Little Poor Man
of Assisi, whether at Crawley, another favourite
home of the poet, or at Pantasaph, he seems to
have been thoroughly happy. He enriched
the Franciscan Annals with the altogether
exquisite lines " Ex Ore Infantium," already
mentioned, and a noble poem, " Franciscus
Christificatus " — besides many prose articles,
in one of which he anticipated much of the
powerful plea for greater leniency to Brother
Ass, the body, that he afterwards made in
*' Health and Holiness." An article on Thomp-
son which appeared in Franciscan Annals
shortly after his death mentions his charmingly
simple character : " He was of a surety one of
the most interesting, and one of the most
charmingly simple, and — we must add in these
days of doubt — one of the most intensely and
53
instinctively orthodox, members of our little
flock."
About 1898 Thompson became attached to
the staff of the Academy in London, and to that
journal, and to the Athencsum, contributed
many noteworthy articles and reviews. One of
his colleagues on the Academy states that it was
quite a usual thing when reading over the proof
of an article by Thompson " to exclaim aloud
on his splendid handling of a subject demanding
the best literary knowledge and insight."
Another has shown how Thompson exercised
the privilege, peculiar to the poet, of disregard-
ing the ordinary rules of method and order
pertaining to a business office. He was (we are
told) the most unbusinesslike creature, and
often drove the editor to despair. His " copy "
(always written on pages torn from penny
exercise books) came pretty regularly, but it
was almost impossible to get him to return
proofs. Neither imploring letters nor peremp-
tory telegrams availed. Then he would walk
in, calmly produce from his basket or wonderful
pockets a mass of galleys, and amongst them, as
likely as not, two or three telegrams unopened.
But (to quote Mr. Meynell once more) " editors
forbore to be angry at his delays, for after a
54
POST lAV^jy ^ITSTIC
while of waiting, they got from him, at last,
what none else could give at all." It would be
an utterly false conception of the poet to
imagine that his life was spent in idleness. He
lived every line of his poems — and the wonder
is that with a body so weak, his brain should
have been so incessantly active. Day and night,
indoors or out, he was always at work on that
cathedral of lovely thought which his name
now represents. In " Health and Holiness "
there is a memorable passage beginning :
*' This truth is written large over the records
of saintliness, the energy of the saints has left
everywhere its dents upon the world." And
in one of his poems the lines :
From stones and foets you may know
Nothing so active is, as that which least seems so —
are examples, among many, which go to give
a sidelight view of his own ideas on the value
of " pauseless energy."
Strangely enough his boyhood interest in
matters military remained with him to the
end. Mr. Hind soon saw the poet's fondness
for campaigns, and tells how he made the most
of it : "I discovered that his interest in battles,
and the strategy of great commanders, was as
55
keen as his concern with cricket. So his
satchel was filled with military memoirs, and
retired generals, ensconced in the arm-chairs of
service clubs, wondered. Here was a man who
manipulated words as they manipulated men."
A pen picture of Thompson at the time that
he was on the Academy staff, furnished by an
intimate associate, thus depicts him :
A stranger figure than Thom-pson's was not to-
he seen in London. Gentle in looks, half-wild in
externals, his face worn by -pain and the fierce
reactions of laudafium, his hair and straggling
beard neglected, he had yet a distinction and an
aloofness of bearing that marked him in the
crowd ; and when he opened his lips, he spoke as
a gentleman and a scholar. A cleaner mind, a
more naively courteous manner, were not to he
found. It was impossible and unnecessary to
think always of the tragic side of his life. He still
had to live and work in his fashion, and his entries
and exits became our most cheerful institutions.
I No money (and in his later years 'Thompson
suffered more from the possession of money than
from the lack of it) could keep him in a decent suit
of clothes for long. Tet he was never " seedy.'''*
From a newness too dazzling to last, and seldom
56
"POST ^,9{T> SMTSTIC
achieved at that, he passed at once into a 'pictu-
resque nondescript garb that was all his own and
made him resemble some weird pedlar or packman
in an etching by Ostade. This impression of him
was helped by the strange object — his fish basket, '
we called it — which he wore slufig round his
shoulders by a strap.
Thompson cared nothing for the worWs com-
ment, and though he would talk with radiant
interest on many things, it was always with a
certain sunny separateness, as though he issued
out of unseen chambers of thought, requiring
nothing, but able and willing to interest himself
in the thing to which his attention was drawn.
He had ceased to make demands on life. He
ear-marked nothing for his own. As a reviewer,
enjoying the run of the office, he never pounced on
a book ; he waited, and he accepted. Interested
still in life, he was no longer intrigued by it. He
was free from both apathy and desire. Un-
embittered by the destitution and despair he had
known, unestranged from men by his passionate
communings with the mysteries of faith and
beatific vision, Thompson kept his sweetness and
sanity, his dewy laughter, and his -fluttering
gratitude. In such a man, outward ruin could
57
never be pitiable or ridiculous, and, indeed, he
never bowed his noble head but in adoration. I
think the secret of his strength was this : that he
had cast up his accounts with God and man, and
thereafter stood in the mud of earth with a heart
wrapped in suchjire as touched IsaiaWs lips. He
was humbly, daringly, irrevocably satisfied of his
soul.
*****
1 cannot follow, far less expound, the faith
which 'Thompson held so humbly, and embellished
so royally. But I am very certain that if these
things are so, and if God loves that man who for a
wage of tears refines fine gold for His Ark, and
with bleeding hands digs the rock for its adorning,
then indeed the morass is become firm ground, and
my old friend sees, through some thinner veil,
" the immutable crocean dawn effusing from the
Father's Throne:' *
Another picture of the poet, this time as he
appears to an Eastern mind, is to be found in
S. K. Ghosh's Indian romance, " The Prince of
Destiny." In this dramatic semi-poHtical story
" the presentment of India by an Indian,"
Francis Thompson is introduced as one of the
* Wilfred Whitten (" John o' London,") in 7". P.'j Weekly,
November 29, 1907.
58
"POST <tA^D mrsric
characters, with many an interesting gHmpse of
his personahty. " He was of medium height,
but very sHght of frame, which made him look
taller than he really was. His cheeks were so
sunken as to give undue prominence to a little
grey beard that was pointed at the end, but
otherwise untrimmed." Barath (the Prince-
hero of the tale) meets Thompson at Waterloo
Station, both, as it happens, though unknown
to each other, bound for Boscombe. Barath
notices his eyes, " in fact, struck by them
from the first, he had noticed nothing else.
Whether they were light grey or blue he could
not tell ; it was their lustre, not their colour,
that arrested his attention. As for his garb,
Barath cared little. . . . But the lustre of
those eyes, intensified by the contrast of the
sunken cheeks and emaciated face he had never
seen in England before." Barath is going to
visit a friend, Colonel Wingate. Arrived at
the house, he noticed that the Colonel was
wrapt in thought, ever and anon casting an
anxious glance down the gravel path which ran
past the house in a line with the main road
beyond.
" Yes, we are expecting a friend," Wingate
explains. " Rather, one, the privilege of whose
59
friendship we hope to deserve some day. . . .
I am here to-day and gone to-morrow, but this
man's work will last as long as the English
language lasts — which itself will survive the
wreck of the British Empire."
Needless to say the expected guest is Francis
Thompson, described later in the book as
" this man whose intellect was perhaps the
greatest among Englishmen of his day." A
delightful glimpse is given of Thompson as a
smoker. He takes out his pipe, strikes a match,
gives a puff, holds the match over the bowl till
his fingers are nearly burnt, then throws away
the match, and strikes another — and so on.
Wingate afterwards picks up the matches and
counts them. " Just fourteen ! " he says glee-
fully. But then he wraps them up in a piece
of tissue paper and puts them carefully away
in his vest pocket !
*****
For some years before his death, Thompson
was a familiar object in London streets, com-
muning with the seraphim and cherubim as he
passed along. Like Tennyson's Sir Galahad he
mused on joy that will not cease —
Pure spaces clothed in living beams —
60
"POST <tAv^(T> .mrsTic
and neither the noise nor the fog of London
streets could dispel his visions. He would
wander about alone, apparently in an aimless
fashion, but in reality absorbed in his own
lavendered dreams — that state of alienation
from passing things so necessary for thoughts
" both high and deep." Often enough he
might have been seen clad — winter and summer
alike — in a brown cloak, or ulster, and with a
basket, like a fish basket, slung around his
shoulders. This he used to carry the books he
had to review. Though of a painfully shy and
retiring disposition, he was a cheerful com-
panion, with the saving grace of humour. One
who knew him well as boy and man states that
" in him there sat enthroned not only the stern
and haughty muse of Tragedy, but her gentler
sister, Comedy." He was, too, as numerous
passages in his works denote, a keen student of
science. One failing — if failing it be — he cer-
tainly had : he detested letter-writing. Even
when he did write letters, he forgot, at times,
to post them. A letter of many pages, written
and directed to one of his sisters in 1899, was
discovered among his papers at his death, eight
years later ! The picture would hardly be
complete without adding that, according to
6i
some (the late Mr. Patmore among them),
Thompson was one of the best talkers in the
city. He spoke from his own convictions with
extreme fluency, yet weighing his words in
matters of a controversial nature, and careful
always to avoid offence. The hierarchic order
of the universe, the culture and ethics of the
Greeks, the philosophy of the schoolmen, the
tactics of military commanders in bygone
centuries, the latest advance in science — alike
gave opportunity for the silver and gold
surprises of his speech to the few (the very few)
with whom he was familiar. On his favourite
lines in Shakespeare and Milton, or the merits
and virtues and the hundred niceties of style
of his cricket heroes of the past, he would
enlarge for hours.
For reasons of health he did not give up the
opium habit entirely, but reduced the doses
to small ones, taken at infrequent intervals —
and almost always with the object of relieving
the terrible nerve pains from which he suffered.
Emaciated and worn by disease, he could still
exhibit an extraordinary glow and vivacity of
manner. He dealt largely in the names and
rites of old : the pomp of old-time facts formed
the pomp of his present dreams.
62
The same mental abstraction which caused
him to be nearly run over at Manchester in his
student days — which caused him to be lost on
the South Downs — which resulted in the
burning of the bed on which he had fallen
asleep while smoking in his apartments — and
which is evidently hinted at in the incident of
his alighting at the wrong station on the visit
to Boscombe in the " Prince of Destiny " —
followed him in all his moves.
He seldom spoke of his nightmare days ;
when he did, it was not complainingly. He
could not have written with Tennyson —
/ stretch lame hands of faith, and grope.
And gather dust and chaff ; and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
Aloof from men he dwelt with God, recog-
nizing to the full —
All which I took from thee I did but take
Not from thy harms
But just that thou mightst seek it in My arms.
To his eyes the material universe was
literally full of the " many-coloured wisdom of
God," and Christ he saw
Lo here ! lo there ! — ah me, lo everywhere !
6}
Who can doubt the evident sincerity of the
lines in " Any Saint " ?
But He a little bath
Declined His stately fath
And my
Feet set more high.
# * * *
And bolder now and holder
I lean upon that shoulder,
So near
He is, and dear.
Though Thompson's lot in Hfe was so
opposite to that of the happy soul in Crashaw's
" Temperance " —
^he happy soul, that all the way
To Heaven, hath a summer'' s day —
he was not soured by his dreadful experiences,
but with heart warmed by the Divine presence,
accepted them in a patient, matter-of-fact way,
conscious that he had kept " the white bird in
his breast " protected. To other writers he
was invariably generous. One who had been
associated with him in literary work testifies :
" A more careful or more generous reviewer
never lived ; to contemporary poets, indeed, he
64
"POST <^^T> ^MTSriC
was over tender, and / never heard him speak an
ungenerous word oj any liviJig soul.''''
Devoted to his faith, enthusiastic when
writing of her
About whose mooned brows
Seven stars make seven glows
Seven stars for seven woes —
in word and work ahke severely chaste — ^he has
aheady been called " Our Lady's Poet." A
more loyal courtier of the Queen of Heaven it
would certainly be difficult to find 1
A contributor to the Church T^imes (March
191 1) writes that in later life Thompson always
exculpated his father from any share in the
break with the family which marked the poet's
early years in London ; and clung to the
recollection that they met again, when the
father had been " entirely kind." As a matter
of fact, they met on several occasions, and the
reconciliation was most thorough and complete.
The poet's fondness for children was of the
most natural kind. He did not condescend to
them ; he was one of themselves. Elaborate
dissection of the child-mind did not commend
itself to him at all. " He was content [as a
Visiter in the Christian World Pulpit puts it] to
play with children without analysing them, and
65
/
to pass with them through their own secret
doorways into the wonder-world to which they
belong." In answer to the question which he
himself asks, " Know you what it is to be a
child ? " he gives the answer : , " It is to have a
spirit still streaming from the waters of baptism.
It is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness,
to believe in belief. It is to be so little that
the elves reach to whisper in your ears ; it
is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into
horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into
everything.^
The poet's unaffected child-love is revealed
in many a passage in his works. In " The
Hound of Heaven " it is not in the wind- walled
Palace of Nature, nor yet in the wilful face of
skies, but it is with the little children that he
makes the easing of the human smart come
nearest to realization ! And in another poem,
" To my Godchild," in Faith-drenched lines
he makes it clear it is in the " Nurseries of
Heaven " that he would be placed :
^hen, as you search with unaccustomed glance
'The ranks of Paradise for my countenance,
Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod
Among the bearded counsellors of God ;
For, if in Eden as on earth are we,
66
'POS'T <^fN^ ^MYSTIC
I sure shall keep a younger company :
Pass where hefieath their ranged gonfalons
The starry cohorts shake their shielded su?is,
The dreadful mass of their enridged spears ;
Pass where majestical the eter?ial peers.
The stately choice of the great saintdom, meet —
A silvern segregation, globed complete
In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet ;
*****
Pass the crystalline sea, the lampads seven : —
Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.
*****
Thompson died of consumption. At the
beginning of November 1907, he entered, on -. j
the advice of his friends, the Hospital of St. ^^ I
Ehzabeth and St. John, in St. John's Wood,
London. There he died on the 13th of the
same month, in his forty-eighth year. He had
prepared himself devoutly for the end ; re-
ceived the Sacraments ; and was ready when
the summons, long expected, came.
At the time of entering the hospital he was
so terribly emaciated that he weighed but five
stone. The devoted Sister (Mother Michael)
who tended him states that he was very quiet
and wonderfully unselfish in the ward, where he
was visited from time to time by members of
E 6-]
the Meynell family. It is a curious circum-
stance, worthy of passing mention, that among
the books which he kept within reach as he lay
dying, was Mr. Jacobs' " Many Cargoes." He
was interred on the i6th of November, in
St. Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green. His grave
now bears a stone on which, in beautiful letter-
ing (the work of the sculptor Eric Gill) are the
words :
FRANCIS THOMPSON,
1859— 1907
" Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven."
Surely no more suitable epitaph from his
own works could have been chosen for one
who, with all his gifts, was still a child at
heart !
The sorrows of his earlier days had endeared
him to his friends, and if the " uses of his
adversity " had any sweets at all, among them
must surely be reckoned the added endearment
of those he cherished. In his cofhn were roses
from the garden of Mr. George Meredith,
inscribed with Mr. Meredith's testimony, " A
true poet, one of a small band " ; and violets
from kindred turf were sent by Mrs. Meynell,
whose praises he had with such soul-worship
sung. Mr. Meynell's biographical note pre-
68
"POST <^^T> ^MTSriC
faced to the volume of " Selected Poems "
ends : " Devoted friends lament him, no less
for himself than for his singing. He had made
all men his debtors, leaving to those \\\\o loved
him the memory of a unique pcrL-onality, and
to English poetry an imperishable name."
His rich and varied colourings with their old-
time touches of recaptured glory, his rapt
mysticism and high thinking, the wide range of
his mental vision, and the answering splendours
of his lofty imaginings, have placed him high
in the permanent ranks of fame. Indeed, it is
true to say of Thompson — as of Shelley, Keats,
and Tennyson — that so long as poems are read,
so long will some of them, at least, be his — the
great, though hitherto but little known
Victorian, who shall yet be counted memorable
by all jealous of the high traditions of our
English Song.
69
OF F'F^A:JiCIS THOMTSO^S
O ye dead. Poets, who are living still,
Immortal in your verse, though life be fled —
And ye, O living Poets, who are dead.
Though ye are living, if neglect can kill —
Tell me if in your darkest hours of ill
With drops of anguish falling fast and red
From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head,
Ve were not glad your errand to fulfil?
Longfellow
rUOMTSO^^^HT) THS
veiipicr OF TIMS
IN literature, as in science and art, the
great works of the high thinkers have
not always obtained immediate appre-
ciation. Indeed, many of the writers whom
the verdict of time has placed among the
immortals have, according to their bio-
graphers, been slow of recognition. Coleridge,
Keats, and, to a greater extent, Wordsworth,
may be cited off-hand as examples of poets
whose works remained enshrined for many
years in the breasts of comparatively few
readers.
It need occasion no surprise, therefore, that
Francis Thompson's poetry, although hailed
with delight by the critics, is not yet as widely
known as its merits deserve ; nor need it be
thought that his verse will pass into semi-
oblivion because, in the short space since the
poet's death, it has not become the subject of
universal notice from lovers of the muse.
Great poetry advances but slowly in general
estimation. Its appeal is always in the first
instance to the more discerning thinkers, and
73
then to the larger body who are content to, or
must of necessity, follow their lead. Of poetry
meant — like Thompson's — to enlarge and
elevate the mind, rather than tickle the
vanity or follow the fashions of the age, it is
especially true that its complete recognition
must be the result of that maturer judgment
which time alone can give. Doubtless, also,
the deep symbolism pervading many of Thomp-
son's poems must be taken into account in
any consideration of the ultimate estimate of
his work ; but it should be remembered that
symbolism, when combined with clarity of
vision and depth of poetical insight, may be
the stronghold for a precious message which
might, without such protection, be lost.
It has been well said that in all real poetry
— poetry that is to endure — there must be
certain essentials : melody of rhythm ; fertility
of ideas ; beauty of sentiment ; skilful dignifi-
cation and blending of words ; the faculty of
seeing what is dark to others. To say that
Thompson had a wonderful and fascinating
melody of rhythm ; a profusion of the loveliest
ideas ; a deep, reverent, and ever-present
sentiment and sense of the beauty on every
side, and a profound mastery over many kinds
74
vs^ipicr OF ri^is
of versification which he wedded to an extra-
ordinary range of subjects — is not to exceed,
but to fall below, the pronouncements of many
of the greatest authorities. But over and
above the richness of essentials, he had a vision
so celestial, combined with an imagery so bold,
yet withal so rich and beautiful, that he stands
unsurpassed in these qualities by any con-
temporary poet. Transcendent thought, glow-
ing pictures, striking flashes of imagination,
spell-binding touches of loveliness, passages
of " intertwined intellectualism," abound in
Thompson's verse. His is no more the poetry
for an idle man as a substitute for a cigar than
is Browning's. He takes an idea and develops
it, adding layer after layer of thought with
the insight of the seer, and the enthusiasm of
the mystic saturated in consciousness of the
supernatural. He roams heaven and earth
alike in his quest for comparisons to illustrate
the fancies of his mind. The marvel is that,
being so heavily weighted with thought and
symbol, he should proceed smoothly ; yet
proceed smoothly he does — a very Paganini of
flowing sound. The great things and the
small alike serve his purpose. He is as " gold-
dusty with tumbling amidst the stars " as
75
'THO^M'^SO^ ^A5^CT> THE
Shelley (to whom he applies the description),
yet a piece of burnt wood supplies the clue
which he fashions into the subtle thought —
Designer Infinite / —
Ah ! must Thou char the wood ere
Thou canst limn with it P —
and a simple flower the lines —
God took a fit of Paradise-wind,
A slip of ccerule weather,
A thought as simple as Himself,
And ravelled them together.
True it is that such passages as —
Thou hast devoured mammoth and mastodon.
And many a floating bank of fangs,
The scaly scourges of thy primal brine.
And the tower- crested plesiosaure.
Thou fillest thy mouth with nations, gorgest slow
On purple ceons of kings ; —
(taken from his poem addressed to Earth) are
to be found, yet nevertheless the same hand
wrote the exquisitely simple lines :
Little Jesus, wast Thou shy
Once, arid just so small as I ?
And what did it feel like to be
Out of Heaven, and just like me ?
76
vs%T>icr OF ri^^s
I should think that I would cry
For my house all made of sky ;
I would look about the air.
And wonder where my angels were.
Like Blake, it was his —
To see a world in a grain oj sand,
A heaven in a wild flower —
Unlike Blake, his mysticism is never " merely
mist," nor are his visions of awful holiness ever
curtained in " concealing vapours purposely
impenetrable."
If no songster has beaten so painfully against
the bars of the flesh, surely none has sung, as
Thompson, at times, with such an ecstasy of
delight. If many of his poems are charged
with self-conscious sadness and bitter self-
analysis, there is still enough of joyous offering
left to catch his readers " fast for ever in a
tangle of sweet rhymes." To read his verse is
to walk for ever after in a more beautiful,
though, perchance, more mystical world of
life and thought,, and of correlated greatness,
with a tread which —
Stirring the blossoms in the meadow grass
Flickers the unwithering stars.
77
The world and human life were, to Thomp-
son, " crammed with Heaven and aflame with
God." Thus, while Wordsworth, Tennyson,
and Browning speak of their spiritual expe-
riences in a more or less uncertain way, the
spiritual experiences of Thompson are as real
as the physical — the practice of asceticism
deliberately propounded and accepted. In
" The Mistress of Vision " he puts forth his
" stark gospel of renunciation," and asks :
Where is the land of Luthany,
Where is the tract of Elenore F
I am bound therefor.
The answer is the heroic one of abnegation
and self-denial contained in the lines which
follow the passage quoted, abnegation and self-
denial which he himself ardently practised in
his maturer years — practised, we are assured,
as well as preached. Doubtless this poem,
" The Mistress of Vision," will rank eventually
next to " The Hound of Heaven " for spiritual
potentiality allied with genius of inspiration.
Thompson's poetry is, as one writer puts it,
" all compact of thought " — thought elabo-
rated with exquisite subtlety, and an endless
profusion and variety of metaphor and simile,
78
v8%Tncr OF rims
drawn from a thousand sources, but most
happily from his profound knowledge of the
Old and New Testaments, and the philosophy,
dogma, and liturgy of the Catholic Church.
Indeed, to go back to the poet of " white fire,"
to whom Thompson has been most frequently
compared : is not Crashaw himself often out-
stripped, even in his own special glory of
" mixing heaven and earth," by our own poet ?
Mr. J. L. Garvin, on reading Thompson's
first volume, wrote that in the rich and virile
harmonies of his line — in strange and lovely
vision — in fundamental meaning — ^Thompson
is possibly the first of Victorian poets, and at
least of none the inferior — a view which time
has strengthened and the poet's later works
confirmed. Whether the recent assertions of
Mr. G. K. Chesterton and others, that the
critics now class Thompson with Shelley and
Keats, be true or not, there can be no question
but that all serious critics are agreed in placing
him among the imperishable names of English
Song. Certainly no list of the four or five
greatest poets of the nineteenth century would
be conclusive without the name of Francis
Thompson !
From the simple and lovely lines " To a
79
THO^M'PSO^ z.^^h(J) THE
Snowflake," "Daisy," "The Poppy," "The
Making of Viola " (in which he describes the
making of a child in Heaven), and the rest of
his childhood verses, to the regal " Ode to the
Setting Sun " and the airy elegance of " Dream
Tryst," and on again to " The Orient Ode "
and " The Anthem of Earth," Thompson
passes from the simplest to the grandest
elements of being, and shows himself a
Great freafpoitited Prodigal of Song
This mad world soothing as he sweeps along.
Even Tennyson, with his great quality of
making words musical, is surpassed by the
younger poet. If anyone should doubt this,
let him study the poems mentioned, and end
with " To my Godchild " and " A Corymbus
for Autumn." Verses such as these, and the
inspired " Mistress of Vision " (of which Sir
A. T. Quiller-Couch declared that no such
poem had been written since Coleridge
attempted, and left off writing, " Kubla
Khan "), will continue to soar among the peaks
of literature and adorn
The gold gateway of the stars^
as " The Hound of Heaven " will continue to
be cherished — though its full grandeur may be
80
v8%T>icr OF Tims
grasped only by the deeper-soulcd few — to the
end of time.
A glance through any of the volumes of
Thompson's poems will at once show that
many of his lines need careful study, besides
the assistance of a dictionary and books of
reference on many subjects — ancient and
modern. But this may be said with certainty :
if the precise hues of the poet's meaning cannot
always be seen at once, the central idea is clear
enough, and glory of colour is -present, though
its splendours may be too great for immediate
comprehension. Writing on this aspect of the
poet's works, a writer in the Irish Rosary for
September 1912 says : "There is no mist or
haze attached to his imagery. They will catch
away the mind's breath at the first flash, but
when they have been read carefully, they will
soon become clear-seen and clear-cut, even
brilliant in their obscurity, obvious perhaps by
their very unexpectedness. His most intricate
harmonies are loaded with a rush of music that
may perplex, but which works itself out in the
end, perhaps upon the quaver of the last
syllable : the feeling remains with the reader
all the time that nobody else could quite have
written it, and that Thompson himself could
81
not have written anything else, that his words
and expressions have waited a thousand years
for his coming to claim and set them to the
highest use. He did not open his images like
sky-lights to make clear a chance meaning here
and there in his work, but he opened, as it
were, a whole apse of windows to illuminate
one central idea throned altarwise. Each of
his poems is builded delicately, like a great
window of stained glass, and every fragment of
it is filled with the rich colour inherent to his
words. At the first rush of thought the eyes
are dazzled as by a sudden blaze from above,
yet at a little distance every word falls har-
monized and ordered into a network of metre,
which grapples colour to colour and syllable to
syllable as simply and convincingly as the
beaded lead that controls the splendoured
glories of some rose-window."
In the qualities peculiarly his own — the
combination of insensuous passion and spiritual
fervour, courtly love and saintly reverence,
ecclesiastical pageantry and liturgical splen-
dour— in his mountain-top ecstasies and the
remoter flights of his wonderful imagination —
he stands absolutely apart from any other
English singer ! It was Professor Dowden
82
vs%T>icr OF risMS
who wrote of " Sister Songs " : " Every page is
wealthy in beauties of detail, beauties of a kind
which are at the command oj no living foet, other
than Mr. 'Thompson.'^''
That our poet knew something at least of
the greatness of his work may be gathered from
the lines :
/ hang ^mid men my needless head,
And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread ;
The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper
'Time shall reap, but after the reaper
The world shall glean of me — me the
sleeper ! Poems.
With
The loud
Shouts of the crowd
he was not concerned. Rather would it have
pleased him to know that his voice would
become audible when the " high noises " of the
throng had passed. In his review of the poetry
of Mrs. Meynell, there occurs a passage which
illustrates this, and might, in very truth, be
applied to much of his own muse :
" The footfalls of her muse waken not sounds, but
silences. We lift a feather from the marsh aiid
F 83
say : ' This way went a heron.'' ... It
is foetry, the spiritual voice of which will
become audible when the ' high noises ' of to-
day have followed the feet that made them."
What other, of all the poetry of the nine-
teenth century, has awakened such silences of
thought and such soulful meditation as " The
Hound of Heaven," " The Mistress of Vision,"
and " The Anthem of Earth " ?
To come at length to another characteristic
of Thompson's verse — reference must certainly
be made to his frequent neologisms and his
love of big words. To those who complain of
the poet's own coinage, it need only be said
that the use he makes of words non-existent in
pre-Thompsonian English is, after all, the
poet's justification. To quote again from the
Irish Rosary : " Delight, not indignation, is
the proper attitude of people who are made
suddenly aware that fine gold has just been
brought to light in their rock-garden." To
those who complain of the length of his words,
it may be said that though, when they are
viewed separately, one wonders how many of
the huge boulder-like word-masses ever got
hoisted safely into their places, once in position,
84
vs%Dicr OF ri^Ms
they so fit the great structures of which they
form part that their ruggedncss is absorbed in
the total effect. The exceptions are about as
rare as angels' visits !
That the poet who, in his own words,
Drew the bolt of Nature'' s secrecies,
should abound in " Nature touches " is what
might be expected. " Mist of tears," " vistaed
hopes," " chasmed fears," " skyey blossoms,"
" vapourous shroudage," " dazv?iing answers,"
" sighful branches,^'' " tones of floating light,''"'
" poet's calyxed heart," " windy trammel,"
and a hundred other examples might be given
of the descriptions drawn from natural pheno-
mena in Thompson's poetry.
Another feature still of Thompson's verse is
its astonishing variety :
^ he freshness of May, and the sweetness of June,
And the fire of July in its passionate noon —
each finds a place in the gorgeous " pomp and
prodigality " of his muse. Lines on Children,
on Cricket, on the English Martyrs, on the
Dead Cardinal of Westminster (Cardinal ]\ tan-
ning)— verses of " utter chastity " on the
benefactress v/hom he calls his " dear adminis-
85
mom'pso^ ^Av^ t:ks
tress " (the inspirer of the group of poems
" Love in Dian's Lap ") — chants of the Autumn
and Nature — odes to the rising and sinking
Sun — poetic representation of scientific truth —
poems of sadness and poems of ecstasy —
detached fragments of thought and philosophy
— Alights into the realms of theology and
mythology — images drawn from the Scriptures
and the liturgy of the Church, — all are there,
with many a word of " learned length and
thundering sound " adorning, without loading,
the sense he wishes to convey. Admirers of
Shelley will come across many a passage of
Shelleyan flavour : lovers of Shakespeare many
a passage of Shakesperean touch. Take as an
example of the latter (one only out of many in
" Sister Songs ") :
From cloud-zoned -pinnacles of the secret spirit
Song Jails precipitant in dizzying streams ;
And, like a mountian-hold when war-shouts stir it,
The mind^s recessed fastness casts to light
Its gleaming multitudes, that from every height
Unfurl the flaming of a thousand dreams.
In such a treasury it is difficult to pick and
choose for samples of the poet's art, but the
following passages from the pieces indicated
86
vs%T>icr OF ri^Ms
may serve to give some idea of the poet's
style :
I. Tet^ even as the air is Tumorous of fray
Before the first shafts of the suit's onslaught
From gloom's black harness splinter,
And Summer move on Winter
With the trumpet of the March, and the pennon
of the May ;
As gesture outstrips thought ;
So, haply, toyer with ethereal strings !
Are thy hlifid repetitions of high things
The murmurous gnats whose aimless hoverings
Reveal song^s summer in the air ;
The outstretched hand, which cannot thought
declare,
Yet is thought'' s harbinger.
These strains the way for thine own strains
prepare ;
We feel the music moist upon the breeze.
And hope the congregating poesies.
Sister Songs.
II. Lo, in the sanctuaried East,
Day, a dedicated priest
In all his robes pontifical exprest,
Lifteth slowly, lifteth sweetly.
From out its Oriefit tabernacle drawn,
87
Ton orbed sacrament confest
Which sprinkles benediction through the dawn;
And when the grave processio?i''s ceased,
The earth with due illustrious rite
Blessed, — ere the frail fingers featly
Of twilight, violet-cassocked acolyte,
His sacerdotal stoles unvest —
Sets, for high close of the mysterious feast,
The sun in august exposition meetly
Within the fiaming monstrance of the West.
Orient Ode.
^ ^■. ^ JJ. 4t;
Of Shelley and Keats — if reference must be
made — it will suffice to say that, singularly
tuneful and marvels of pure melody as their
own verses are, it is a relief at times to pass from
their earthly sweetness to the loftier heights
and sublimer beauties of Francis Thompson —
the " toyer with ethereal strings " — the poet
" God-smitten." Contrast the lines from
Shelley's " Hymn to Intellectual Beauty " (the
poem which most of all contains his own
special " Gospel ") :
Thy light alone — like mist o^er mountains driven,
Or music by the night wind sent,
Thro'' strings of some still instrument.
Or moonlight 07i a midnight stream.
vs%Dicr OF rims
Gives grace and truth to lifers unquiet dream.
Love, Hofe, and Self-esteem, like clouds defart
And come, for some u?icertai?i moments lent.
Alan were immortal, and omnipotent.
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art.
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his
heart.
* * * * *
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine — have I not kept the vow P
*****
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past — there is a harmoiiy
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky.
Which thro'' the summer is not heard or seen.
As if it could not he, as if it had not been I
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm — to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
Or the lines from Keats —
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours ;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
89
From swinged, censer teeming :
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of f ale-mouthed frophet dreaming.
Tes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind.
Where branched thoughts, new grown with
pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind —
and the rest of Keats's " Ode to Psyche " (an
ode in which he took special pains to express
his distinctive thought), with the soul-feeding
beauties of Thompson's " Hound of Heaven,"
or the latter's poem " To Any Saint," the
most marvellous compendium of Christian
mysticism that has ever been penned in poetic
lines.
If the message of Shelley was — as it seems to
have been — that love and beauty shall endure
to unite all things ; and the message of Keats
to restore the spirit of the Greeks and " Art for
Art's sake," that of Francis Thompson is, at
any rate, the more exalted. For in what does
it differ, save in the manner of delivery, from
that cry of the great Augustine, which has
rung down the ages in ever-increasing
volume ?
90
V6%T>ICr OF ri^MS
'Thou hast made us for Thyself^ and our hearts
are restless u?!til they find their rest in Thee.
This sentence of the Aristotle of Christianity
echoes through the poetry of Francis Thompson
— and if literary fame, to be immortal, must be
linked with an undying message, then, surely,
to the poet of " terrible depths and triumphant
heights " is Immortality assured.
91
^MJDTSS 03i^S0M6 OF
F%A3iCIS THOMTSOJ^S
TO SMS
THS HO U3^ OF
H6^V6\_
Fear wist not to evade, as Love zvist to pursue.
Tjie Hound of Heaven
FRANCIS THOMPSON leapt into fame
among those able to discern true
poetic genius by the chance discovery
of the verse-set gems contained in a short poem
which he composed when on the verge of
destitution and despair. Since the day when
this singer of golden song wrote on a soiled
scrap of paper, picked up by him in a London
street, the lines which first brought about his
recognition, his works have been read and
re-read with increasing appreciation, while the
greatest critics have vied with one another in
proclaiming his praise. But if there is one
work more than the rest of the vagrant Prodigal
of Song (albeit not the one first alluded to)
which has fired the heart and glistened the eye,
it is his religious ode entitled " The Hound of
Heaven." This wonderful lyric came as an
inspiration amid the doubt, and darkness, and
the imperfect faith of other Victorian poets.
Throughout its lines God is no vague abstrac-
tion, but a Presence most intimate — loving,
95
7 HE HOV^D CF E6(t/jV6^
and eagerly pursuing the soul that would find
satisfaction elsewhere than in Him. It is, of all
foems ferhaps, the poem of Divine insistency.
Whether the original idea, which developed
in course of time into " The Hound of Heaven,"
was first planted in the author's mind by the
thought of the pursuing love in Silvio Pellico's
" Dio Amore," or, as seems more likely, was
suggested by one of the poems of the Spanish
mystic known as St. John of the Cross (of whom
Thompson was a close student and admirer),
or whether it arose solely out of the circum-
stances of the poet's own life and the innate
sense, which runs through so many of his verses,
of the nearness of Heaven and the proximity
of God — is a matter of surmise. Certain it
is that no mystical words of such profound
power and such soul-stirring sweetness have
been written in modern times. The title, as
apart from the subject-matter, may have been
borrowed from Celtic mythology, in which
the title " Hound " (as where Cuchulain, the
hero of Irish romance, is called " the Hound
of Ulster ") is a term of honour — or been
suggested, as seems probable enough, by the
" Heaven's winged hound " of the opening act
of Shelley's " Prometheus Unbound."
96
THE HOU^rO OF HS^VS^
Though it may be said that in a certain sense
Thompson viewed the world as but the footstool
of the Highest, he was yet supremely conscious
of the beauty displayed on every side, from the
shadows of Divine beauty cast by the Designer
Infinite upon the curtains of sky and cloud,
down to the lowliest flower of earth. The ex-
quisite glimpses of the things of Nature — those
shapers of his own moods, which he incidentally
presents in the course of the poem as the tremen-
dous Lover (God, symbolized as the Hound)
pursues His tireless quest — strike at once the
imagination, as surely as the impressive symbol-
ism employed penetrates and illumines the soul.
The deliberate speed, the majestic sweep of the
lines, produce an impression of unrushing splen-
dour but seldom equalled, even in the master-
pieces of literature, outside the Hebrewprophets.
Here and there one is reminded, by the
spirituality of thought and phrase, of a similar
vein in Crashaw — or by the fine frenzy of a line
to something akin in Blake or Rossetti. To the
present writer the lines —
/ tempted all His servitors, hut to find
My own betrayal in their C07ista?icy^
In faith to Him their fickleness to me,
Their traitorous true?iess, and their loyal deceit —
97
THE HOU^D OF HS^VS^
invariably recall the well-known oxymoron in
Tennyson's " Elaine " —
His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith, unfaithful, kept him falsely true.
The idea of the " arches of the years " in the
opening section —
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days ;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years ; —
would undoubtedly be suggested by the bridge
of life in the lovely " Vision of Mirzah "
contributed by Addison to the Spectator under
date September i, 171 1. This bridge (seen by
Mirzah after he had listened to the tunes of
the shepherd-clad genius which reminded him
of those heavenly airs played to the departed
souls of good men, upon their first arrival in
Paradise, to wear out the impressions of their
last agonies) consisted of " three score and ten
entire arches, with several broken arches, which,
added to those that were entire, made up the
number about an hundred." Such a piece of
superfine prose would be certain to make a deep
impression on Thompson's susceptible mind.
In poetry it is more or less essential that
besides the outer gems that flash on all alike,
98
rUS H0U.9CD OF H6^^^V8.9C
there should be some that lie below the surface,
and need some mental digging to unearth. In
" The Hound of Heaven " these hidden gems
abound, but they can hardly be said to be too
deeply buried for the earnest seeker, when
once the prevailing idea and the nobility of
the poet's thought are grasped. The sym-
bolism employed, though often most daring, is
free from the disfiguring " eccentricity " of
many mystical poets : the thought and diction
befit the exalted subject of the verse, and
transcend all conventions.
The poem proceeds by way of striking
similes, which hold the reader spellbound in
an atmosphere of spiritual elevation : fresh
and more towering peaks of mental conception
come into view as the grandeur of the theme
develops ; the end is in the Valley of Calm,
where the surrender of the tired wanderer
follows as a natural climax, in lines of the most
touching and exquisite simplicity. The spell
of " The Hound of Heaven " is such that
hundreds of its readers date their drawing to
the Feet of that " tremendous Lover " of
Whom the poet sings, to the day when the
poem's appealing music first broke upon their
'" encircling gloom."
G 99
rne hou^d of hs^vs^
The chief interest lies, perhaps, in the
genuine humanity which pervades the poem
throughout, and in the wonderful mental
pictures often conjured up, sometimes by a
single line. In the few words —
Adozvn Titanic blooins of chasmed fears ;
as again in the lines —
/ swung the earth a trinket at my wrist ;
and —
Tet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of eternity ; —
a host of conceptions may arise in the mind
without exhausting the full meaning of the
poet's words. Great alike in theme and
execution, and in the completeness of its
message, it is safe to say that as a religious
poem " The Hound of Heaven " has no
superior. It stands unique, for all the world
and for all time !
Amid all the artistic trope and perfect poetic
imagery, certain passages will appear more
noteworthy to some than to others, but it will
surely be of special interest to most to note
that it is in the little children's eyes that the
soul approaches nearest the object of its quest,
100
THS H0U,9CD OF H8^1V8.?C
ere it sinks beneath the Hand outstretched
caressingly.
It is a curious fact, not devoid of significance,
that the poem was constructed at the time
that Thompson was composing melodies of a
very different order — the lines varied, sweet,
and gay, which make up his volume of " Sister
Songs," published in 1895. As "The Hound
of Heaven " appeared in Thompson's first
volume of poems, issued in 1893, it would seem
that the actual year when the " poem for all
time " was written may have been either 1892
or 1893.
Strange and startling fancies in words ;
adjectives that illumine like " furnaces in the
night " ; deep sounds and echoes — the sounds
of restless humanity in search of the world's
witchery, the echoes of the message of the
Psalmist of old, — and underlying all, the
pleading of the Father for His prodigal son : —
such, in short, is " The Hound of Heaven."
lOI
0T>6 ro THS
Thou dost thy dying so triutnfhally :
I see the crimson blaring of thy shawms !
Ode to the Setting Sun
WHATEVER may have been the
general method of Francis Thomp-
son in settling the final wording of
his poems, he seems to have been at special
pains in giving its ultimate form to his " Ode
to the Setting Sun." Words, lines, and whole
passages have been reshaped since the first
appearance of the poem in Merry Englarid*
A noticeable change lies in the substitution of
simpler language, an example of which may be
seen in the passage altered from —
Thou swa'f St thy sce-ptred beam
0''er all earth'' s broad, loins teem^
^he sweats thee through her 'pores to verdurous
spilth ;
Thou art light in her light,
Thou art might in her might,
Fruitjulness in her fruit, a?td foizon in her
tilth—
in the Ode as it originally appeared, to
* Merry England, September 1889.
103
0D£ ro me ssrrL'Nig sus^
Thou sway' St thy sceptred beam
O^er all delight and dream.,
Beauty is beautiful but in thy glance ;
Arid like a jocimd maid
In garland-flowers arrayed.
Before thy ark earth keeps her sacred dance —
as the lines occur later in the volume of " New
Poems."
As the Ode now stands, free from some of
the more startling archaisms and coinage of
words, it must ever rank as a great spell-binding
poem, a pageant of scintillating colour and
sound. The marvels and undreamt-of treasures
of the wonder-working Sun are drawn out at
length, and heaped up, through many a poetic
line, for the beholder's gaze. The regal
splendours befitting the subject, the ornateness
and dignity of the poet's thought, the symbolic
references and sacramental vision — conduct the
reader along the passage between matter and
soul, and show him some of the many-splen-
doured things conceivable only by the mind of
the Seer. Something of the majestic strains of
Handel's " Largo " ; of the soul-filling sweet-
ness of Gounod's " Messe Solennelle " ; of the
lights and raptures of a De Beriot's " Ninth
Concerto " ; something, too, of the indefinable
104
0T>6 ro rns s erring su.9c
witchery of certain of Chopin's Nocturnes —
surge into the ears as the recital continues.
Amid such dehghts as these is the reader
carried from the " world too much with us " to
realms of more spacious beauty.
The Ode is divided into three parts. In the
Prelude, the setting Sun — " a bubble of fire " —
drops slowly, as the poignant music of the
violin and harp are borne into the soul. In the
Ode proper, the note of sadness — the sunset
mood — is continued ; the mystical twins of
Time — Death and Birth — come into the poet's
mind, " and of these two the fairer thing is
Death." As in some great musical masterpiece,
the opening bars — low, sad, and weird — prepare
the way for the cymbals' clang and the full
orchestral effects, so here : nor is it long before
the " music blasts make deaf the sky." In
bewilderingly beautiful language the poet pro-
ceeds to depict the splendours of the sun's
triumphal dying, and to consider the sway of
its sceptred beam from the time of its birth —
the time when it burst from the great void's
husk and leaped " on the throat o' the dusk."
The deluge, " when the ancient heavens did in
rains depart " ; the lion " maned in tawny
majesty," the tiger " silver-barred," and the
105
0T>s ro rns ssTri.v^cg su^
stealthy stepping pard ; the entombed trees
(now the light-bearers of the earth) ; the rose
" cupped to the marge with beauty," the
" draped " tulip, the " snowed " lily, the earth
itself suckled at the breast of the sun, and
" scarfed " with the morning light, — these, and
many a gorgeous miracle of the sun's working,
are examined in turn, and over each the sway
of the " spectred beam " is shown. The wind
and the wailing voices that should meet from
hill, stream, and grove to chant a dirge at the
red glare of the Sun's fall — the Naiad, Dryad,
and Nereid :
The Nymph wan- glimmering by her wan founfs
verge —
all are conjured up as in their wonted haunts.
And then the scene changes :
A space, and they fleet from me. Must ye fade —
O old, essential candours, ye who made
The earth a lim?ig and a radiant thifig —
And leave her corpse in our strained, cheated
arms P
The poet sees in their departure a resem-
blance to his own " vanishing — nay, vanished
day," and his dark mood is only changed by the
deferred thought of Eternity, whereat " a
1 06
ODS TO THS SSTTl^q SU^
rifting light burns through the leaden brood-
ings " of his mind.
O blessed Sun, thy state
Uf risen or derogate
Dafts me no more with doubt ; I seek and find.
In the opening lines of another of his great
majestical poems, the " Orient Ode," the poet
sees in the Sunrise a symbol of the Church's
Benediction Service. Now, in the Setting Sun,
he sees a radiant image of the King-maker of
Creation, a type indeed of Calvary —
Thou art of Him a type memorial,
Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood
Upon thy western rood —
and his sadness lifts at the thought, which
naturallv follows, of the Resurrection.
The vein of triumph thenceforth predomi-
nates ; for it is the falling acorn buds the tree,
and as —
There is nothing lives but something dies —
so, too —
There is nothing dies but something lives —
and though birth and death are inseparable on
earth
They are twain yet one, and Death is Birth.
107
OT>s ro rus serrifNig su.9c
In the after-strain (the concluding part of
the Ode) the note of triumph rings again : a
message from the tender Queen of Heaven
leaves the poet " light of cheer," and in the end
he gives thanks for his very griefs :
The restless zvi?idzvard stirrings of whose feather
Prove them the brood of immortality.
The " Ode to the Setting Sun " (written at
Storrington in 1889) possesses a unique interest,
inasmuch as it was the first poem of length that
Thompson wrote after his rescue from the life
of poverty in London, and afforded the first
all-convincing revelation of the poet's genius.
It is one of his " great " poems, full of that
princely opulence of imagination which distin-
guished "New Poems," though short, perhaps,
of the matured mysticism of " Orient Ode " or
the master-craftsmanship of " An Anthem of
Earth " — that marvel of poetic creation — in the
same volume.
One of the many functions of poetry is to
penetrate beyond the reach of science, and
reveal, in reverential way, certain hidden truths
of nature which, without the imagination of
the poet to cross the abysses of dividing space,
might remain but irritating and unpictured
108
OT>S TO THS S6Tri.9(jg SU,'9^
mysteries. Canon Sheehan expresses this in
The Intellectuals : " She (Nature) retreats, as
we advance, and gathers up her skirts, lest the
very swish of them should reveal her hiding-
places. There is one, and one only, to whom
she reveals herself, and lifts up her veil : and
that is her poet."
Such a poet, letting in a flood of many-
coloured light upon the world — drawing the
veil from the beauty of the Creator's handi-
work— and " purging from our inward sight the
film of familiarity which obscures from us the
wonder of our being " (as in his " Ode to
the Setting Sun ") is Francis Thompson !
109
THOMTSO^NZS D^IST
Her beauty smoothed earth'' s furrowed jace !
Daisy
FRANCIS THOMPSON'S poem
" Daisy " has something more suggestive
of Wordsworth about it than the mere
resemblance of sweet simpHcity to " Lucy "
and " We are Seven." In a charming httle
poem written of his beloved sister Dorothy,
under the pseudonym of Emmeline, Words-
worth refers to her as " a little Prattler among
men," and goes on to say that she gave him
love, and thought, and joy :
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares, and delicate Jears ;
A heart, a fountain oj sweet tears ;
And love, and thought, and joy.
Are not all these, in the case of the little
Prattler — his sister of an hour — whom Thomp-
son met at Storrington, contained, in childish
measure, in her token-gift ?
A look, a word of her winsome mouth,
And a wild ras-pberry.
Was it quite unconsciously of the " cares " and
" fears " and " fountain of sweet tears " of
III
Wordsworth, and of Wordsworth's own
" Daisy " *—
With little here to do or see
Of things that in the great world he,
Sweet Daisy ! oft I talk to thee —
(as unconsciously as if they had been non-
existent)— that Thompson tells of " the wise,
idle, childish things " he talked to his Daisy,
and the sweetness (albeit the sweetness in the
sad) she brought to him ? We know at all
events that Thompson was thoroughly ac-
quainted with the poetry of Wordsworth (with
what great poetry was he not ?) — and often
spoke of it. We know, too, that the younger
poet, out of the vast storehouse of his memory,
frequently made use of some thought or
suggestion, arising, unconsciously it might be,
from the works — a phrase or single word at
times — of others, whether prose or verse. To
take an instance (the first that comes to mind)
of each : must not the lines from " Sister
Songs " —
And Summer move on Winter
With the trum-pet of the March, and the pennon
of the May —
* In the first of the four Wordsworthian "Daisy" poems.
112
have had their forerunner in the passage from
De Quincey (whose " Confessions," by the way,
Thompson knew almost by heart) —
Midsummer like an army with banners, was
movifig through the heavens —
as surely as the passage (again from " Sister
Songs ")—
In fairing time, we know, the bird
Kindles to its deepest splendour —
have had its conception in the Tennysonian —
/// the Spring a livelier iris changes on the
burnish'' d dove . . . ?
Much will be written in years to come of
those qualities of Thompson which bear
affinity to the genius of Wordsworth — or
rather of those dissimilarities in which is to be
found each poet's peculiar strength : the calm
austerity of the one, the " passionless " passion
of the other ; Wordsworth's pensive Daffodil
culled so immediately as to have the dew still
fresh upon it — Thompson's correlated flower
so linked to things unseen as to trouble by its
plucking some far-off star. But all that need
be said here is that if Thompson had written
no other poem than his gorgeously coloured
113
"Poppy," "A Fallen Yew" (destined, like
Wordsworth's " Yew Trees," to " last with
stateliest rhyme "), and " Daisy " (the simplest
perhaps of all his poems), his title to a poet of
Nature would be secure.
'7^ "7? W ^ w
The name of the child of the poem — the
sweetest flower on Sussex hills that day — is
unknown. Efforts have been made to trace
her, but without success. Beautiful she must
have been. As in " The Hound of Heaven,"
it was within the little children's eyes that the
poet came nearest to that after which he sought,
so doubtless it was in the loveliness of her
young eyes (he refers to her " sweet eyes," and
again to her " lovely eyes ") that the fascina-
tion of the Daisy-Flower of Storrington
lay. A trifle it may be, but a trifle indicative
of the poet's mind, is the fact that once, at
Pantasaph, he singled out from Coventry
Patmore the passage
What is this maiden fair,
The laughing 0/ whose eye
Is in man's heart renewed virgi^iity —
for special comment and admiration.
The poem is one of mingled joy and sorrow.
114
It concludes with a verse, the last lines of
which —
For we are born in others 'pain
And perish in our own —
have often been quoted. Many will wish that
the concluding verse had not been written.
The poem is complete without it : the poignant
grief seems to go beyond the scope of the
theme, and to add sadness (if one may so
venture to put it) for sadness' sake.
It seems to the present writer that there are
two pictures of Francis Thompson which
might, conceivably, be painted — and which,
executed by an artist worthy of the task, would
serve to give a truer idea of the poet — man and
soul — than any description in words. The
first, mystical of necessity in conception, would
need to show him — with thought-consumed
body and saintly face — the marks of his scars
still fresh upon him — leaning with reverent
boldness in the manner of which he himself
furnishes a picture in " Any Saint " :
And holder now and holder
I lean upon that Shoulder,
So dear
He is, and near :
n 115
THO.M'PSO^S 'D<iAISr
And with His aureole
The tresses of my soul
Are blent
In wished content.
The other (the simpler the better) would
depict him talking to the unknown child at
Storrington, the beautiful child of whom, as
she stood
Breast deep mid flower and spine,
he sings, unforgettably, in " Daisy."
ii6
O World Invisible, we view thee.
In no Strange Land
WHEN Francis Thompson died, early
in the winter of 1907, he left
among his papers a short unfinished
poem bearing the double title :
In no Strange Land
The Kingdom of God is within you
which is noteworthy as the last and at the same
time one of the most characteristic of his
works. For in these triumphing stanzas there
is held in retrospect — as Mr. Meynell puts it —
the days and nights of human dereliction
which the poet spent besides London's river,
and in the shadow — but all radiance to him —
of Charing Cross. Obviously differing from
his polished masterpiece, " The Hound of
Heaven," the shorter poem bears yet a resem-
blance in that it treats of the world to be
discerned by the eyesight that is spiritual, and
exhibits a conception of equal daring. Thus
the splendid audacity which, in the one,
symbolizes God as the pursuing Hound, depicts,
in the other, Jacob's ladder pitched betwixt
117
THO^M'PSO^S LzASr "POSm
Heaven and Charing Cross,* and Christ walking
on the water 7iot of Gennesareth but Thames I
Though Thompson has been styled the
" mighty mystic," he has many pieces of sweet
simplicity. His lines on a " Snowflake," and his
verses entitled " July Fugitive," " A Dead
Astronomer," " After her going " are, among
others, such as a child can understand ; and in
the last gift of his muse he has left an epitome
of his life's verse, expressed in a clear and
striking form, the beauty and significance of
which few can miss.
It is when dealing with his favourite subject
of the intimacy of God that the poet, whose
heart was warmed by the Divine Presence as
he sold matches in the street, displays his
greatest charm. Here, compressed in the space
of twenty- four lines, is to be found the very
inmost of his thought, combined with a
lustrous simplicity befitting the vehicle of his
final message. Many who find themselves
breathless in the elevation of " The Hound of
Heaven " will, in the later lines, be able to
follow the mind of the poet with ease, and
* An interesting similarity of thought is suggested by the
"Jacob's ladder" line of Thompson's poem and verse ii
of Tennyson's " Early Spring."
ii8
THo^i'Pso^s L^jtsr TO em
grasp the import of his teaching to the
full.
It has been said of another of our English
poets (Chatterton) that he was " Poetry's
Martyr." The description applies to Thomp-
son also, but in a far nobler sense. The hopes
of his youth blighted — crushed, as it seemed,
on every side — it was the equally bitter lot of
Francis Thompson to learn by experience that
" turning love's bread is bought at hunger's
price," and to find himself (in words of his own
telling) —
Like one who sweats hejore a despofs gate,
Summoned by some presaging scroll ojjate,
And knows not whether kiss or dagger wait ;
And all so sickened is his countenance,
T^hat courtiers buzz, '"'' Lo, doomed ! " and look at
him askance.*
Yet, racked as he was, he stood true to his
visions with enduring patience, and with a
courage that has no counterpart on the field
of battle. His was the martyrdom of living :
to deliver his message, he prolonged his life, so
full of physical pain, to the utmost. That he
lived so long was due to his unconquerable
mind, his indomitable will to live — to live and
* "Sister Songs."
119
sanctify the bodily suffering of his later
years.
Through all the outer darkness of his ' ' uncom-
panioned " days, the poet of the light within
remained the same rapt celebrant of the soul,
feasting his gaze on the world invisible, and
proclaiming the high things that lie beyond
the lowly. The very bitterness of his trials
only strengthened his assurance in the reality
of the hidden things of which he testifies.
What wonder, then, that his last testimony
should be of such special significance and
potentiality ?
The angels keef their ancient places ; —
Turn but a stone, and start a wing !
''Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-sple?tdoured thing.
*****
Tea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry, — clinging Heaven by the hems ;
And lo, Christ walking on the water.
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames !
Surely the angels must have clapped their
hands with delight as the poem proceeded.
What " The Hound of Heaven " is among
the poet's longer pieces, his poem of the Vision
120
THOmTSO^S L<tASr TOSm
of Thames — unpolished and unfinished though
it be — is among the shorter. Both are adorned
by tears and sunshine, and both are the
channels of his profoundest message —
Heaven in Earth, and God in Man ! *
* This lin> occurs in Crashaw's " H/mn of th • Nativity .' '
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