Francis Thompson, The Preston-born poet, with notes on some of his works

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OB. A.D. 1892.

Francis Thompson,

THE

Preston-born Poet f

<with Notes on some of his works),

BY

JOHN THOMSON.

PRESTON :

ALFRED HALEWOOD,

"THE TEMPLE OF THE MUSES,"

1912. \

PR,

sz.

Crozier A Co.,

Printers,
North Rd., Preston,

PREFACE.

The idea of this brief outline of the life and works of
Francis Thompson was suggested by the erection of the
commemorative tablet on his birthplace, and by enquiries then
made concerning his life and career. I am indebted to Mr.
Meynell for permission to quote from Thompson's poems, to
Sir Alfred Hopkinson for information as to the poet's 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 of March, 1908. I
am also indebted 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 & Gates, Orchard Street, London, the
Poet's publishers.

JOHN THOMSON.

44, Great Avenham Street,

Preston, September, 1912.

TO

FRANCIS THOMPSON.

THOMPSON, thy music like a deep stream flows
From mystic heights, and mirrors as it goes
The shades and splendours of that luring peak,
Where poet-dreamers dwell, and tireless seek
Their adequate strains ; and thy song is fed
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 music 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 crowned gates, and entrance gain

To highest Heaven, through the Arch of Pain !

j. T.

FRANCIS THOMPSON,

POET AND MYSTIC.

Got songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play;

Go, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow : -
And some are sung, and that was yesterday,

And some unsung, and that may be to-morrow.

Go forth ; and if it be o'er stony way,
Old joy can lend what newer grief must borrow :

And it was sweet, and that was yesterday,
And sweet is sweet, though purchased with sorrow.

(F. Thompson),

FRANCIS THOMPSON, poet and mystic,
" master of the lordly line, the daring image, and the
lyric's lilt," was born at Preston, on the 18th December,
1859, in the house numbered 7, Winckley Street, now used
as a solicitor's office. He was baptised 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
advisable that he should, as he ever afterwards did, adhere
to the shorter form. The commemorative tablet placed,

8 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

on the lOlh 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 enquiries, could the exact place
of birth of one destined " down the annals of fame to
carry a name immortal " — the greatest of his proud town's
sons — be found.

The poet's father was Charles Thompson, a physician of
some note locally — a man (according to a writer in the
Church Times, April 21, 1911) firm and kind, but some-
what austere in discipline, and with no poetic instinct ;
his mother, Mary Turner Thompson, formerly Morton.
Both parents were Catholics : the mother a convert some
years before her marriage. Francis was the second of the
five children, all of whom were born in Preston. Two
babies, Charles Joseph, the firstborn (who only lived a
day), and Helen Mary, the fourth, are buried there.

Dr. Thompson appears to have lived in several houses in
Preston — the one in Winckley Street, already mentioned;
before that (probably 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. 33)— one in 1861, the other in 1862. It
was whilst residing in Latham Street, in 1864, that his
daughter Helen Mary died, and his last child was born.
The doctor's removal to Ashton-under-Lyne towards the

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 9

end of 1864, while his three surviving children were so
young, will account for that town being sometimes given
as the poet's birthplace.

Young Thompson was sent on the 22nd September, 1870,
to Ushaw College, near Durham, well known at that time
for its literary associations with Lingard and Wiseman, and
later, with Lafcadio Hearn. Our youthful 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, some-
times, 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. Indeed, the " sunlit pitch " seems
to have 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 30 years, most care-
fully 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 :

io FRANCIS THOMPSON.

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,

Though my own red roses there may blow ;
It is little I repair 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 reminiscent of the
" long ago " will be understood 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 (September 4, 1897)— a criticism full of
Cricket acumen.

Whilst at Ushaw, Thompson wrote a number of verses,
some of which are still in the possession of the college
authorities, or of college companions. In more than one,
the quaint spelling and love of the older words which

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 11

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 excite interest among
Thompson lovers. Its theme is the praise of poesy :
the first three verses run : —

Still, be still within my breast, thou ever, ever wailing

heart ;
Hush, O hush within my bosom, beating, beating heart

of mine !
Lay aside thy useless grief, and brood not 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 'twas for a priceless

stake ;
Well 'twas foughten, well we've struggled, and, tho' all

our hopes are slain,

Yet, my soul, we have a treasure not the banded world
can take.

Poesy, that glorious treasure ! Poesy my own for e'er !
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 now our night is
almost done.

12 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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.

Neither in arithmetic, nor later in mathematics, 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 com positions, 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 debating club in 1874 (the year Thompson
passed from seminary into college proper), evoked con-
siderable enthusiasm among his companions.

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 13

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." 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 his preliminary examination, he did not devote himself
to the reading necessary for the profession which it was
intended he should follow: like the youthful Keats 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 there being the historic meeting of Lancashire
and Gloucestershire on July 25, 26, and 27, 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,

I4 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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 and striking memorial recently (July, 1912)
affixed in Manchester University to Thompson's memory
as a student at Owens College bears some sad lines (taken
from his " Ode to the Setting Sun ") which may serve to
indicate the sense of disappointment haunting his life at
the period of closing his medical studies :

Whatso looks loyelily
Is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain.
Why have we longings of immortal pain,
And all we long for mortal ? Woe is me,
And all our chants but chaplet some decay
As mine this vanishing— nay vanished day.

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
was set on the construction of sentences rather than the
structure 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 abruptly fled from home. In the ordinary course he
would have spent the summer vacation of that year (1885)
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

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 15

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. Meynell : " 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 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 ; later as a " collector " for a book-
seller, 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 must have
been suggested by this period :

In the rash lustihead of my young powers,

I shook the pillaring hours

And pulled my life upon me ; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years —
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.

Ah! must

Designer infinite —

Ah ! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn
with it?

16 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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 Man-
chester, 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 attractions of laudanum (whose wiles he
learned whilst a student of medicine) to bring some
measure of relief. It is related that on one occasion in his
darkest days he was so strongly tempted to self-destruction
that he only escaped the tempter by some mysterious,
unseen intervention, and that the heaven of which he
speaks :

Short 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 "nightmare" time: —

BIRTHPLACE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON,
7, WINCKLEY STREET, PRESTON.

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 17

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,
Yea, was the outcast mark

Of all those heavenly passers' scrutiny ;

Stood bound and helplessly
For Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me ;
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour

In night's slow-wheeled car :
Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
From under those dread wheels ; and, bled of strength,

1 waited the inevitable last.

Then there came past

A child ; like thee, a Spring flower ; but 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 :
Then fled, 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 magazine to which Thompson sent his first
accepted piece was Merry England. For a couple of
years he had been sending verses, written on scraps of
paper picked up in the streets, to impatient editors — but
without result. To the journal mentioned he sent, some
time late in 1888, in hopelessly unpresentable manuscript,
a poem which has been described as one of the brightest
lights of his genius. The brilliancy of the verse-set gems
was recognised 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

i8 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

verses, determined 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 kindness and sympathy of both Mr. and Mrs.
Meynell, he agreed to place himself under their care. He
was received temporarily into their home, and made the
friend of their children. After being medically treated and
carefully nursed, he lived for nearly two years in the
monastery at Storrington, in Sussex — the Storrington of
his " Daisy-flower."

It is to Mr. Meynell, his " more than friend," that the
literary world will have to look, in the forthcoming
biography of the poet by that brilliant writer, 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,
Mrs. Meynell (the gifted poetess eulogised 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 " W. M.,n he addressed the
touching lines :

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 19

O tree of many branches ! One thou hast
Thou barest not, but grafted'st on thee. Now,
Should all men's thunders break on thee, and leave
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 !

Of Storrington, Mr. Meynell in his biographical 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 possibilities as a poet." From
thenceforth (November, 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 not yet as widely known
as those of 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 1893, under the simple title, " Poems," attracted attention
immediately. Of one of the longer pieces, " The Hound
of Heaven," 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 great critic summed
it up as "the return of the nineteenth century to Thomas a

20 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

Kempis." It delighted men of such diverse minds as Sir
Edward Burne-Jones and Mr. Coventry Patmore ; 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 Times
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. Its exquisite paintings
of the things of Nature — wind, sky, and cloud — which are
incidentally presented as the theme proceeds, strike the
imagination of all to whom the revelation of natural
beauty appeals ; the genuine humanity and the powerful
symbolism running through the whole of the poem, sink
deep into the mind and soul. The subject matter — God's
pursuit and conquest of the resisting soul that would
find its satisfaction elsewhere than in Him (God being
symbolised 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

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 21

than this It is 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 3&r. 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," dedicated to
Monica and Madeline Meynell (whose names are thus
immortalised), appeared in 1895. Included in it is a
poem, " Poet and Anchorite," which contains some lines
memorable by their insight into the poet's inner self: —

Love and love's beauty only hold their revels
In life's familiar, penetrable levels :

What of its ocean-floor ?

I dwell there evermore.

From almost earliest youth

I raised the lids o' the truth,
And forced her bend on me her shrinking sight —

It was from stern truth, then, that the Prodigal of Song
learnt his Art !

" Sister Songs " is described by Mr. Archer as " a
book which Shelley would have adored." The Times
says it contains passages which 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.

22 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

.... These c 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 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
summarizing a thousand youthful longings after beauty."

Maud Diver in her novel " Candles in the Wind "
has many fine things to say of Thompson'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
recognise 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 Setting Sun," which is, in
itself, a pageant of colour and sound ; a deathless vindi-
cation of Death's 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.

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 23

" Matchless for their beauty," and similar expressions
frequently occur in the general descriptions of the volume
of " New Poems."

In August, 1908, appeared "The Selected Poems of
Francis Thompson," with the biographical note by Mr.
Meynell before referred to, and a portrait of the poet in his
nineteenth year. 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 so admirably
chosen, before a wide circle of readers. The poems on
children rightly take the first place ; of the one entitled,
" Ex Ore Infantium," it is but sober truth to say that
nothing so tenderly devotional, and yet so daringly uncon-
ventional, has ever before been put into language of such
simple power. The 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 " 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.

24 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

It should be mentioned that the poet had promised an
Ode for the centenary of Ushaw College, in 1908, but did
not live to write it.

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. For Thompson was not only a poet,
but in his later years a writer of prose as sonorous and well
nigh 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 have yet to be reprinted 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 Shelley was pronounced by Mr. George

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 25

Wyndham to be " the most important contribution to pure
letters written in English during the last twenty years."
For " The Life of St. Ignatius of Loyola " which must
ever remain a memorial to his powers as a prose-writer,
original research was, of course, impossible, but, as stated
in the editor's note, the author brought to his work the
sympathy of genius with genius, and had almost a
contemporary's affinity with the age in which the Saint
lived. The Rev. Dr. Barry, himself a distinguished
writer, say? 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 outwardly, had much of similarity below the
surface.

" The Life of St. John Baptist de la Salle," a shorter
work, presents the life of the Founder of the Christian
Brothers with singular felicity, and contains in the closing
chapter a brilliant epigrammatic defence of the Church's
championship 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

26 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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 themselves 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 states 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 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 encouragement 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 The Nineteenth Century,
" unless perhaps here and there in a sonnet of Rossetti's,
has this xsort of sublimated enthusiasm for the bodily and
spiritual beauty of womanhood found such expression
between the age of the Stuarts and our own ? "

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 27

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 intensity of his mysticism, the
glow and fervour of his verse, his rapturous communings,
seem to 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 ecstacy. 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. Thompson's
poetry at its highest attains a sublimity unsurpassed by any
Victorian poet. — The Speaker.

To read Mr. Francis Thompson's poems is like setting sail
with Drake or Hawkins in search of new worlds and golden
spoils. He has the magnificent Elizabethan manner, the
splendour of conception, the largeness of imagery.— KATHARINE
TYNAN-HINKSON, in The Bookman.

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 Patmore. 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
bewilderingly. Such reed-notes and such orchestration of sound

28 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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 Thompson'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.— C. 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 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 Fortnightly 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 life 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
occasion (sometime in 1897j, 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
injury, save such as an irate landlady poured, justly
enough, upon his head.

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 29

He lived for some months during 1893 in the Franciscan
Monastery at Pantasaph, in North Wales, and stayed
later, for a short time, in the Monastery at Crawley. In a
letter written to an old schoolfellow from Pantasaph, in
the summer of 1893, he mentions that he had been so
badly bitten in the arm as not to be able to use his pen
properly.

About 1898 he became attached to the staff of the
Academy, and to that journal, and to the Athenaum,
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
disregarding 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 peremptory 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 forebore to be
angry at his delays, for after a while of waiting, they got
from him, at last, what none else could give at all."

3o FRANCIS THOMPSON.

A pen picture of Thompson at the time that he was on
the Academy staff may be of interest :—

A stranger figure than Thompson's was not to be seen in
London. Gentle in looks, half-wild in externals, his face
worn by pain and the fierce reactions of laudanum, 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 be 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.

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. Yet
he was never "seedy." From a newness too dazzling to
last, and seldom achieved at that, he passed at once into
a picturesque 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 slung round his shoulders by a strap.

Thompson cared nothing for the world's comment, 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. Unembittered
by the destitution and despair he had known, unestranged
from men by his passionate cpmmunings 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

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 31

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 wrapt in such fire as touched
Isaiah's lips. He was humbly, daringly, irrevocably
satisfied of his soul.

I 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 Thompson, 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-
political story " the presentment of India by an Indian,"
Francis Thompson is introduced as one of the characters,
with many an interesting glimpse of his personality. " He
"was of medium height, but very slight of frame, which
"made him look taller than he really was. His cheeks
" were so sunken as to give undue prominence to a little
" grev 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

* WILFRED WHITTKN ("John o' London,") in T. P.'s Weekly, November 29, 1907,

32 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

"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 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 gleefully. But then he
wraps them up in a piece of tissue paper and puts them
carefully away in his vest pocket !

FRANCIS THOMPSON AT THE AGE OF FIFTEEN.

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 33

For some years before his death, Thompson was a
familiar object in London streets. He would wander
about alone, apparently in an aimless fashion, but in
reality absorbed in his own lavendered thoughts — that
state of alienation from passing things so necessary for
artistic contemplation. 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 companion, 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
certainly had : he detested letter writing. The picture
would hardly be complete without adding that, according
to some, (Mr. Coventry 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. Indeed, he would not knowingly have
hurt a talkative fly ! 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 oppor-
tunity for the silver and gold surprises of his speech to the
few (the very few) with whom he was familiar. Of

34 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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.

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.

The same mental abstraction which caused him to be
nearly run over at Manchester in his student days, which
lost him 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 —

I 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, recognising to
the full-
All which I took from thee I did but take
Not for thy harms
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 35

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 !

Who can doubt the evident sincerity of the lines in
" Any Saint ? " :

But He a little hath
Declined His stately path

And my
Feet set more high.

+ + + +

And bolder now and bolder
I lean upon that shoulder,

So near
He is, and dear.

Though Thompson's lot in life was so opposite to that of
the happy soul in Crashaw's " Temperance "

The 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 was over tender, and / never heard him speak
an ungenerous word of any living soul."

Devoted to his faith, enthusiastic when writing of her

About whose mooned brows
Seven stars make seven glows
Seven stars for seven woes —

36 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

in word and work alike severely chaste — he has already
been called " Our Lady's Poet." A more loyal courtier of
the Queen of Heaven it would certainly be difficult to find !

A contributor to the Chunk Times (March, 1911) 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."

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 Thompson. " He was content (as a
writer in the Christian World Pulpit puts it) to play with
children without analysing them, and 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 can 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, but nowhere more notably perhaps
than in the beautiful passage in " The Hound of Heaven "
where the soul approaches nearest to the object of its

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 37

quest. For it is not in the wind-walled Palace of Nature,
nor yet in the wilful face of skies, but it is within the little
children's eyes that he makes the easing of the human
smart come nearest to realisation ! And in another poem
" To my Godchild," in lines of tender felicity, he makes it
clear it is in the " Nurseries of Heaven " that he would
be placed : —

Then, 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,
I sure shall keep a younger company :
Pass where beneath their ranged gonfalons .
The starry cohorts shake their shielded suns,
The dreadful mass of their enridged spears ;
Pass where majestical the eternal 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 the advice of his friends,
the Hospital of St. Elizabeth 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 ; received 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

38 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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 the Meynell
family. It is a curious circumstance, 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 16th November, in St. Mary's Ceme-
tery, Kensal Green. His grave now bears a stone on
which, in beautiful lettering (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 line could have been chosen
from his works for one who, with all his intellect, 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 coffin 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 prefaced to the
volume of " Selected Poems " ends : " Devoted friends
lament him, no less for himself than for his singing. He

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 39

had made all men his debtors, leaving to those who loved
him the memory of a unique personality, and to English
poetry an imperishable name."

His rich and varied colourings with their old-time
touches of re-captured 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 English
Song.

Thompson and the Verdict of Time.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF
THOMPSON'S VERSE.

Thompson and the Verdict of Time,

In literature, as in science and art, the great works
of the high thinkers have not always obtained immediate
appreciation. Indeed, many of the writers whom the
verdict of time has placed among the immortals, have,
according to their biographers, been slow of recognition.
Coleridge, and to a greater extent, Wordsworth, may be
cited offhand 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 among the general
public as its merits deserve ; nor need it be thought
that his verse will pass into oblivion because, in the
short space since the poet's death, it has not become
the subject of more extensive notice. Great poetry
advances but slowly in general estimation. Its appeal
is always in the first instance to the more discerning
thinkers, and then to the larger body who are content
to, or must of necessity, follow their lead. Of poetry
meant — like Thompson's — to elevate the mind rather than
tickle the vanity or follow the fashions of the age, it

44 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

is especially true that its due recognition must be the
result -of that maturer judgment which time alone can
give. Doubtless, also, the deep symbolism pervading
many of Thompson'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 com-
bined with clarity of vision and depth of poetical insight,
is but 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
dignification 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 of versification which
he wedded to an extraordinary 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 rich and beautiful, that he stands
unsurpassed in these qualities by any poet of his age.
Transcendent thought, glowing 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

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 45

takes an idea and develops it, adding layer after layer
of thought with the daring of the true poet, and the
enthusiasm of the mystic saturated with consciousness
of the supernatural. Ranging heaven and earth in his
quest for comparisons to illustrate the fancies of his mind,
he "oozes poetry at every pore." In the wealth of his
wonderful words, he makes from the old hard-worked
English language the materials for almost a new dictionary.
The marvel is that, being so heavily weighted with word
and thought, he should proceed smoothly ; yet proceed
smoothly he does — a very wizard of musical speech. The
great things and the small alike serve his purpose. He
is as " gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars " as
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? —

and a simple flower the lines —

God took a fit of Paradise-wind,

A slip of coerule weather,
A thought as simple as Himself,

And ravelled them together.

Although 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 aeons of kings; man's hulking towers
Are carcase for thee, and to modern sun
Disglutt'st their splintered bones —

46 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

(taken from his poem addressed to Earth) are to be
found, it was nevertheless the same hand which wrote
the exquisitely quaint and simple lines :

Little Jesus, wast Thou shy
Once, and just so small as I ?
And what did it feel like to be
Out of Heaven, and just like me ?
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;
And at waking 'twould distress me —
Not an angel there to dress me !

Like Blake, it was his—

To see a world in a grain of sand,
A heaven in a wild flower —

Unlike Blake, his mysticism is never shrouded in mist,
nor are his visions of awful holiness ever curtained in
" concealing vapours."

If no songster has beaten so painfully against the bars
of the flesh, surely none has sung, as Thompson, at times,
with such an utter ecstasy of delight. If many of his
poems are charged with a self-conscious sadness and
pessimism 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,
a more mystical world of life and thought, and of corre-
lated greatness, with a tread which —

Stirring the blossoms in the meadow grass
Flickers the unwithering stars.

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 47

The world and human life were, to Thompson,
" crammed with Heaven and aflame with God." Thus,
while Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning speak of
their spiritual experiences in a more or less uncertain
way, the spiritual experiences of Thompson are as real
as the physical — the practice of ascetism deliberately
accepted and propounded. 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?
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 as well
as preached. Doubtless this poem — "The Mistress of
Vision " will rank eventually next to " The Hound of
Heaven" for spiritual potentiality combined with genius
of inspiration.

An interesting collection of great poetic lines has
recently been made by a famous American (Mr. Hudson
Maxim), and is given at the end of his monumental
work on " The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy
of Language." The author claims for his list that it
probably embraces by far the larger part of the greatest
poetic lines in the English language. Of the hundred
and ninety-two examples selected, all chosen for their

48 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

rich poetic thought, two are from Longfellow, two from
Tennyson, three from Wordsworth, and four each from
Shelley and Thompson.

Thompson's poetry is, as one writer puts it " all
compact of thought" — thought elaborated with exquisite
subtlety, and an endless profusion and variety of metaphor
and simile, drawn from a thousand sources, but most
happily, from his profound knowledge of the Old and
New Testaments, and the Church's philosophy, dogma,
and liturgy. Indeed, to go back to the poet of "white
fire," to whom Thompson has been most frequently,
and most aptly perhaps, compared : is not Crashaw him-
self often outstripped, 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. C. K. Chesterton
and others, that all serious critics now class Thompson
with Shelley and Keats, be true or not, there can be no
question but that critics, whether serious or otherwise,
are agreed in placing him among the imperishable names
of English Song. Certainly no list of the six greatest
poets of the nineteenth century would be conclusive
without the name of Francis Thompson !

FRANCIS THOMPSON IN 1893,

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 49

v/ From the simple and lovely lines " To a 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 Anthem of Earth" and
" The Orient Ode," Thompson passes from the simplest
to the grandest elements of being, and shows himself a —

Great pre-appointed Prodigal of Song

This mad world soothing as he sweeps along.

Even Tennyson with his great quality of making
language 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 "The
Cloud's Swan Song." Verses such as these, and the
inspired " Mistress of Vision " (of which Sir A. T.
Quiller-Couch declared that so 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 grasped only by the
deeper-souled 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.

50 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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 him-
self could 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 great 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 harmonized and ordered into a net- work
of metre, which grapples colour to colour and syllable to

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 51

syllable as simply and convincingly as the beaded lead that
controls the splendoured glories of some rose-window.'*

That Thompson knew something at least of the great-
ness of his work may be gathered from the lines : —

The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head,
Heavy with dreams, as that with bread ;
The goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeper
The reaper reaps, and Time the reaper.

I 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 crowd 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 and say :

* This way went a heron.' . ... It is poetry,
the spiritual voice of which will become audible when the

* high noises ' of to-day have followed the feet that made

52 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

What other, of all the poetry of the nineteenth century,
has awakened such silences of thought and such soulful
meditation as " The Hound of Heaven " and " The
Mistress of Vision " ?

To come at length to another characteristic of
Thompson's verse — reference must certainly be made to
his frequent neologisms. To those who complain of the
poet's own coinage, it need only be said that the splendid
use he makes of words non-existent in pre-Thompsonian
English is, after all, the poet's chief justification. To
quote again from the Irish Rosary: " Delight, not indig-
nation, is the proper attitude of people who are made
suddenly aware that fine gold has just been brought to
light in their rock-garden."

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," " Titanic
glooms," "chasmed fears," " skyey blossoms," " sighful
branches" li vapourous shroudage," "dawning answers,"
"cowled night," "strings of sand" "windy trammel,"
" parable in the pathless cloud " — and a hundred other
examples might be given of the descriptions drawn from
natural phenomena, in Thompson's poetry.

Another feature still of Thompson's verse is its
astonishing variety :

The freshness of May, and the sweetness of June,
And the fire of July in its passionate noon —

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 53

each finds a place in the gorgeous " pomp and prodigality "
of his muse. Lines on Children, on Cricket, on the
English Martyrs — verses of " utter chastity " on the
benefactress whom he calls his " dear administress "
(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 ecstacy — detached
fragments of thought and philosophy — flights into the
realms of mysticism, mythology, theology — images drawn
from the Scriptures and the liturgy of the Church, — all are
there, with many a word of " learned length and thunder-
ing sound " adorning, without loading, the sense he
wishes to convey. Lovers of Shakespeare will come
across many a passage of Shakesperean touch ; admirers
of Shelley, many a passage of Shelleyan flavour.

In such a treasury it is difficult to pick and choose for
samples of the poet's art, but the following passages, the
first and second descriptive of flowers ; the third, one
of the extracts from " The Hound of Heaven " given by
Mr. Hudson Maxim in his collection of great poetic lines ;
and the last, a passage illustrative of the more intricate
structure of Thompson's verse, may be taken as typical,
to some degree, of the poet's style : —

(I.) Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare,

And left the flushed print in a poppy there :

Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came,

And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame.

(Selected Poems, " THE POPPY.")

54 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

(II.) Who made the splendid rose

Saturate with purple glows :
Cupped to the marge with beauty ; a perfume-press

Whence the wind vintages
Gushes of warmed fragrance richer far

Than all the flavprous ooze of Cyprus' vats ?
Lo, in yon gale which waves her green cymar,
With dusky cheeks burnt red
She sways her heavy head,
Drunk with the must of her own odourousness ;

While in a moted trouble the vexed gnats
Maze, and vibrate, and tease the noontide hush.

Who girt dissolved lightnings in the grape ?
Summered the opal with an Irised flush ?

(Selected Poems, " ODE TO THE SETTING SUN.")

(III.) I fled Him, down the nights and down the days ;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years ;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind ; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

("THE HOUND OF HEAVEN.")

(IV.) Lo, in the sanctuaried East,

Day, a dedicated priest
In all his robes pontifical exprest,
Lifteth slowly, lifteth sweetly,
From out its Orient tabernacle drawn,
Yon orbed sacrament confest
Which sprinkles benediction through the dawn ;
And when the grave procession'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 flaming monstrance of the West.

(Selected Poems, " ORIENT ODE.")

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

FRANCIS THOMPSON. > -7 55

times to pass from their earthy sweetness to the loftier
heights and sublimer beauties of Francis Thompson —
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 on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man 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?
+ + + + *

The day becomes more solemn and serene

When noon is past — there is a harmony

In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which thro' the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been !

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
From swinged censer teeming :
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming.

56 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

Yes, 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 exalted harmony of Thompson's " Hound of
Heaven," or the latter's poem " To Any Saint," the most
marvellous compendium of Christian mysticism and the
Sermon on the Mount, 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 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 ? : —

" Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are
restless until 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.

The Hound of Heaven/7

"The Hound of Heaven/7

"Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue."

(The 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 com-
posed 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 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 pro-
claiming 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, which is considered by
most of the authorities to be Thompson's poetic master-
piece, came as an inspiration amid the doubt, and darkness,
and the imperfect faith of other Victorian poets. Through-
out its lines God is no vague abstraction, but a Presence
most intimate — loving, and eagerly pursuing the soul that
would find satisfaction elsewhere than in Him. It is, of
all poems perhaps, the poem of Divine insistency.

60 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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 circumstances 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.

Though it may be said that in a certain sense Thompson
viewed the world as but the dustbin for the Creator's
handiwork, he was yet supremely conscious of the beauty
displayed on every side, even in the body of the lowly
worm. The exquisite glimpses of the things of Nature,
those shapers of his own moods, which he incidentally
presents in the course of the poem as the tremendous
Lover (God, symbolised as the Hound), pursues His tireless
quest — strike at once the imagination, as surely as the
impressive symbolism employed, penetrates and illumines
the soul.

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 —

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 61

I tempted all His servitors, but to find

My own betrayal in their constancy,

In faith to Him their fickleness to me,

Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit —

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 1, 1711. 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 sus-
ceptible mind.

In poetry it is more or less essential that besides the
outer gems that flash on all alike, there should be some
that lie below the surface, and need some mental digging
to unearth. In " The Hound of Heaven " these hidden

62 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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 symbolism employed, though often most daring, is
free from the disfiguring ' eccentricity ' of many mystical
poets : the thought and diction befit th« 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 con-
ception come into view as the grandeur of the theme
develops ; the end is in the Valley of Calm, where the
surrender of the tired soul follows as a natural climax, in
lines of the most exquisite simplicity.

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 —

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears ;
as again in the lines —

I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist ;
and —

Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of eternity ;4-

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

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 63

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 doubtless 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, 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 pieces
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."

Ode to the Setting Sun/7

' Ode to the Setting Sun/7

Whatever may have been the general method of Francis
Thompson 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 re-shaped to ' list of his mind '
since the first appearance of the poem in " Merry
England." A noticeable change lies in the substitution
of simpler language, an example of which may be seen
in the passage altered from —

Thou sway'st thy sceptred beam
O'er all earth's broad loins teem,
She sweats thee through her pores of verdurous

spilth ;

Thou art light in her light,
Thou art might in her might,
Fruitfulness in her fruit, and foison in her tilth —

in the Ode as it originally appeared, to

Thou sway'st thy sceptred beam

O'er all delight and dream,

Beauty is beautiful but in thy glance ;

And like a jocund maid

In garland-flowers arrayed,

Before thy ark earth keeps her sacred dance —

as the lines occur later in the volume of " New Poems."

68 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

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 scintil-
lating 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-splendoured things
conceivable only by the mind of the Seer. The majestic
strains of Handel's " Largo " ; the soul-filling sweetness
of Gounod's " Messe Solonnelle " ; the lights and raptures
of a De Beriot's " Ninth Concerto " — surge into the ears
as the recital continues. Amid such delights as these is
the reader carried to, and within, the realms of 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
sun-set 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 proceeds to depict the splen-

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 69

dours 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, the
tiger, and the 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 Naiads, Dryads, and
Nereids, and the other nymphs of old, are all conjured
up in their own 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 living and a radiant thing —

And leave her corpse in our strained, cheated arms ?

The poet sees in their departure a resemblance to his
own " vanishing — nay, vanished day," and his dark mood
is only changed by the deferred thought of Eternity,
whereat "a rifting light burns through the leaden brood-
ings " of his mind.

O blessed Sun, thy state

Uprisen or derogate

Dafts me no more with doubt ; I seek and find.

70 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

In the opening lines of another of his poems, the " Orient
Ode," the poet sees in the Sunrise a symbol of the
Benediction Service of the Catholic Church. 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.

The vein of triumph thenceforth predominates ; 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.

In the after-strain (the concluding part of the Ode)
the note of triumph rings again : a message from the
gentle Queen of Heaven leaves the poet " light of cheer,"
and he gives thanks for his griefs :

The restless windward 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.

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 71

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 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 was Wordsworth ; such a poet, in a large
measure, was Emerson. Such a poet, too, letting in more
than the rest, a flood of many-coloured light upon the
created world (as in his " Ode to the Setting Sun "), was
Francis Thompson !

Thompson's Last Poem.

Thompson's Last Poem.

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 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 resemblance in
that it treats of the world to be discerned by the eyesight
that is spiritual, and exhibits a conception of equal
daring. Tnus the splendid audacity which, in the one,
symbolises God as the pursuing Hound, depicts, in the
other, Jacob's ladder pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing
Cross, and Christ walking on the water of the Thames/

. Though Thompson has been styled the " mighty mystic,"
he has many passages of sweet simplicity. His lines on
a Snowflake and his verses entitled " Daisy " (verses

76 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

which may be compared to the "Lucy" or "We are
Seven " of Wordsworth), are such as a child can under-
stand ; 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 them-
selves 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 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 descrip-
tion applies to Thompson 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 before a despot's gate,
Summoned by some presaging scroll of fate,
And knows not whether kiss or dagger wait ;
And all so sickened is his countenance,
That courtiers buzz, " Lo, doomed ! " and look at
him askance.

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 77

Yet, racked as he was, he stood true to his visions with
enduring patience, and with a courage that has no counter-
part 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 sanctify the bodily suffering of his later
years.

Through all the outer darkness of his uncompanioned
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 keep their ancient places ; —
Turn but a stone, and start a wing !
'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry ; — and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry ; — clinging Heaven by the hems ;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Genesareth, but Thames !

Surely, the angels must have clapped their hands with
delight, as the poem proceeded.

78 FRANCIS THOMPSON.

What "The Hound of Heaven" is among the poet's
longer pieces, his poem of the Vision 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.

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Thomson, John

Francis Thompson

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