SELECTED POEMS OF FRANCIS THOMPSON

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Selected Poems of Francis Thompson With a Biographical Note by Wilfrid Meynell LONDON

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The Twenty-fifth Thousand

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THE CONTENTS

[Pg ix]

A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON FRANCIS THOMPSON

Francis Thompson, a poet of high thinking, "of celestial vision," and of imaginings that found literary images of answering splendour, died in London in the winter of 1907. His life—always a fragile one—doubtless owed its prolongation to "man's unconquerable mind," in him so invincible through all vicissitude that he seemed to add a new significance to Wordsworth's phrase. To his mortal frame was denied the vitality that informs his verse. Howbeit, his verse was himself; he lived every line of it, fulfilling to the last letter his own description of the poet, piteous yet proud:

To this aloof moth of a man science was nearly as absorbing an interest as was the mysticism that some thought had eaten him up; and, to give a light example of his actuality, he who had scarce handled a bat since he left Ushaw College, [Pg x] knew every famous score of the last quarter of a century, and left among his papers cricket-verses, trivial yet tragic. One such verse acquaints us incidentally with his Lancashire lineage:

Born at Preston in 1859, the son of a doctor afterwards in practice at Ashton-under-Lyne, he inherited no literary traditions. He had, to be sure, an uncle, an Oxford convert to Catholicism from the ranks of the Anglican clergy, whose name appears on the title page of Tracts which, perhaps because for their own Times, seem assuredly for no other. The seven years Francis Thompson passed at Ushaw—a college near Durham, which then possessed few literary traditions besides those of Lingard, Waterton and Wiseman, but can now boast Lafcadio Hearn's as well as Thompson's own—were, no doubt, influential for him; for a certain individualism, still lingering in outstanding seats of learning, gave him a lucky freedom to follow his own bent—the ample reading of the classics. After Ushaw he went to Owens College, to qualify for his father's profession; in his preliminary examination [Pg xi] distinguishing himself in Greek. His attempts to translate dead language into living dated back to these days; though of the list of words, which some who

were amused and others who were irritated put down to his own inventing, many were made familiar to him in his intercourse with Milton, with Shelley, with Shakspere—his most vital companions. If these poets went, like Alexander, as far as Chaos, and if Thompson hazarded one step more, as Emerson said Goethe did, Thompson too swung himself safely back again. In Manchester, Literature, if not Melancholy, had already marked him for her own; and it was his Religio Medici rather than his Materia Medica that he put under his pillow, perhaps the lump of it suggesting to him his after image about the poet's dreaming:

A definite reminiscence of the dissecting-room at Manchester may certainly be discovered in his allusion (in An Anthem of Earth) to the heart as

Possibly the sorrow of filial duty unperformed—a sorrow deeper with him than is common among such predestined delinquents—aggravated the bodily ailments which already beset him; and drastic indeed were the remedies he himself prescribed. [Pg xii] "Physician, heal thyself": the dire taunt took flesh, as it were, in Francis Thompson, and his plight was visible to all men. Himself he could not save. Biography strangely repeats itself, not in common mental experience only, but also in uncovenanted details of fact and incident. Like De Quincey, whose writings he took into his blood, Thompson had a nervous illness in Manchester; like De Quincey he went to London, and knew Oxford Street for a stony-hearted stepmother; his wealth, like De Quincey's once, lay in two volumes, for he carried Æschylus in one pocket, Blake in the other; and the parallel might, if to profit, be further outdrawn.

To most incongruous modes of making a living he now put his hand. His assistantship in a shop near Leicester Square would have fitted him for the production of a record of Adventures among Boots; and later, as a "collector" for a book-seller he must often have bent beneath the sack, which, if heavy, so he might comfort himself, was at least heavy with books. Of these things he spoke with a matter-of-fact, all-accepting, simplicity when, a little later, some verses he sent to a magazine brought him believers, who sought until they found him. After a course of medical treatment, he went to Storrington. 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. On its common he met the village child, whom he calls "Daisy," in the verses that are so named. [Pg xiii] And it was characteristic of this poet that from the ordinary episodes of ordinary days he made his "golden musics." When he saw the sunset at Storrington, the resulting Ode was

dotted with local landmarks—the cross, for instance, casting its shadow in the monastery garden. The children of the family in London, into which he was received, were the subjects of Poppy, The Making of Viola, To Monica Thought Dying, To my Godchild—all in the first book of Poems; while two of their number have a noble heritage in Sister Songs. Constant to the end, when he died some newly pencilled lines were found, addressed "To Olivia," a yet younger sister, recalling the strains of fifteen years before:

To their mother likewise were addressed the poems of Fair Love, labelled Love in Dian's Lap, of which Coventry Patmore said that "Laura might have been proud"; hers also were many of the New Poems.

If, therefore, as one critic after another declared, a poet had dropped from the skies—those skies of light—of the Seventeenth Century, he dropped very much upon the spot. "Mr Thompson must simply be Crashaw born again, but born greater," declared the first of his reviewers; and Mr Traill, in The Nineteenth Century, inquired: "Where, unless perhaps here and there in a sonnet of Rossetti's, has this sort of sublimated enthusiasm [Pg xiv] for the bodily and spiritual beauty of womanhood found such expression between the age of the Stuarts and our own?" Mr Traill added boldly his belief—daring then, though acceptable enough now—that "alike in wealth and dignity of imagination, in depth and subtlety of thought and in magic and mastery of language," England possessed in this little volume the evidence of "a new poet of the first rank." More expectedly, Coventry Patmore, in The Fortnightly Review, hailed in the new-comer a disciple of their common master, the Florentine Poet of Fair Love, and expressed the opinion that "Mr Thompson's qualities ought to

place him in the permanent ranks of fame." The Hound of Heaven was to Patmore "one of the very few great odes of which the language can boast."

Such pronouncements proved at least that a poet, who had no friend save such as his published poems gained for him, could count on an immediate recognition for high merit. For these tributes, and many more of like welcoming, placed him instantly out of range of the common casualties of criticism. And he had what poets of old to their great sorrow lacked; he had trial by his peers; a kind fate gave him fellow poets among his reviewers.

Perhaps a more convincing sign even than that of professional praise was conveyed by the chance allusion he lighted on later in Lady Burne-Jones's biography of her husband: "The winter's labour," she says, "was cheered by the appearance of a small volume of poems by an author [Pg xv] whose name (Francis Thompson) was till then unknown to us. The little book moved him to admiration and hope." And, speaking of The Hound of Heaven, Burne-Jones himself said: "Since Gabriel's 'Blessed Damozel' no mystical words have so touched me. 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?"

Sister Songs, published in 1895—the poem of which Mr William Archer has said that "Shelley would have adored it"—is a poem to read aloud; for sound and sense herein celebrate their divine nuptials. One of the high memories of the present writer is that of hearing it so read by Mr George Wyndham at the hearthstone of Byron's granddaughter. The lines therein that deal with sex, dormant in the child-girl, yielded the poet perhaps his most amazing imagery. "Superabundance," murmured some—surely a "fault" as happy as was ever son of Adam's. The charge of obscurity brought against the poem was more apt; for who that did not know of his days—and his nights—in the London streets, could follow such a poignant piece of autobiography as this?

And how shall that final episode be turned more explicitly? There are still a few things left that cannot be uttered, or, if uttered, that become the counterpart, even for the willing ear, of that "tenuity of the bat's cry" reported to elude the common hearing. It is even as Balzac, great talker himself, says, that everything (especially theology I think) is the cheaper for being discussed. Yet this untold story transcends the mere romance of De Quincey's Ann, and might, indeed, for a moment, reverse Rossetti's just indictment of the life of "Jenny"—"It makes a goblin of the sun." For this "flower fallen from the budded coronal of Spring" took root and flourished, even in London mire, and again the fragrant petals unfolded and the greenery grew.

In New Poems Francis Thompson put forth in The Mistress of Vision his stark gospel of renunciation [Pg xvii]. It is the last word of an asceticism which he practised as well as preached—most strait in its abnegation of everything but the beauty his verse, unlike his life, never could renounce. Coventry Patmore, Thompson's true "Captain of Song," used to say that the young poet's prose was even finer than his poetry, and his talk better than both. This was a statement with the true Patmorean touch of paradox. Any way, the talk had no reporter, and of his prose—his "heroic prose," as it has been called—only one example passed, during his life, into book form—the complaint made by Brother Ass, the Body, against its rider, the Soul. This was published under the title of Health and Holiness, accompanied by a Note from Father Tyrrell. But his experiences in prose, as a reviewer, were wide as his sympathies, and these were sanely universal. His articles in The Academy, under Mr Lewis Hind's editorship, must choke up many a

scrapbook. Later, his contributions to The Athenæum afforded him his greatest scope and stimulant; and only with his death came the eclipse of his powers. Editors forbore 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.

About ten weeks before the darkness fell on him the little flame of his life began visibly to flicker. A change to the country was advised; and he became the carefully tended guest of Mr Wilfrid Blunt—not many miles from the Storrington of his early love, to which, however, not wild [Pg xviii] arabs could any longer draw him. He was too weak for any travel, save that which brought him back to London—better, he himself said, but surely dying, as it seemed to solicitous eyes.

Ten days before his death he went as a private patient to the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, in St John's Wood, and there, at the age of forty-eight, on November 13, 1907, he passed away at dawn—the dawn that was the death-hour in his Dream Tryst. He was laid to rest in St Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green. In his coffin were roses from the garden of Mr George Meredith, inscribed with Mr Meredith's testimony, "A true poet, one of the small band"; and violets from kindred turf went to the dead poet's breast from the hand of her whose praises he had divinely sung. Devoted friends lament him, no less for himself than for his singing. He made all men his debtors, leaving to those who loved him the memory of a unique personality, and to English poetry an imperishable name. W.M.

Reprinted, with revisions, from The Athenæum of November 23, 1907.

[Pg xix]

DEDICATION OF "POEMS"

To WILFRID AND ALICE MEYNELL

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DEDICATION OF "NEW POEMS"

To COVENTRY PATMORE

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Poems on Children

DAISY

THE POPPY

To Monica

TO MONICA THOUGHT DYING

THE MAKING OF VIOLA

TO MY GODCHILD

Francis M. W. M.

EX ORE INFANTIUM

From "Sister Songs"

A CHILD'S KISS

POET AND ANCHORITE

THE OMEN

THE MIRAGE

THE CHILD-WOMAN

TO A CHILD HEARD REPEATING HER MOTHER'S VERSES

A FORETELLING OF THE CHILD'S HUSBAND

Love in Dian's Lap

BEFORE HER PORTRAIT IN YOUTH

TO A POET BREAKING SILENCE

A CARRIER SONG

HER PORTRAIT

EPILOGUE TO THE POET'S SITTER

Wherein he excuseth himself for the Manner of the Portrait

AFTER HER GOING

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

A FALLEN YEW

THE HOUND OF HEAVEN

TO THE DEAD CARDINAL OF WESTMINSTER

A DEAD ASTRONOMER

(Stephen Perry, S.J.)

A CORYMBUS FOR AUTUMN

From"THE MISTRESS OF VISION"

THE AFTER WOMAN

LINES:

To W.M.

THE WAY OF A MAID

ODE TO THE SETTING SUN

PRELUDE

ODE

AFTER-STRAIN

EPILOGUE TO "A JUDGEMENT IN HEAVEN"

GRACE OF THE WAY

TO A SNOW-FLAKE

ORIENT ODE

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From "FROM THE NIGHT OF FOREBEING"

An Ode after Easter

A COUNSEL OF MODERATION

From "ASSUMPTA MARIA"

"Thou needst not make new songs, but say the old."—Cowley.

From "AN ANTHEM OF EARTH"

CONTEMPLATION

CORRELATED GREATNESS

JULY FUGITIVE

ANY SAINT

From "THE VICTORIAN ODE"

Written for the Queen's Golden Jubilee Day, 1897

[Pg 127]

ST MONICA

TO THE SINKING SUN

DREAM-TRYST

BUONA NOTTE

Jane Williams, in her last letter to Shelley, wrote: "Why do you talk of never enjoying moments like the past? Are you going to join your friend Plato, or do you expect I shall do so soon? Buona Notte." That letter was dated July 6th; Shelley was drowned on the 8th; and this is his imagined reply to it from another world:—

ARAB LOVE SONG

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

"IN NO STRANGE LAND"

[Pg 134]

ENVOY

[Pg 135]

Appreciations of Francis Thompson

"Such pronouncements proved at least that a poet, who had no friend save such as his published poems gained for him, could count on an immediate recognition for high merit. For these tributes, and many more of like welcoming, placed him instantly out of range of the common casualties of criticism."—From the "Note on Francis Thompson" (p. xii). As the writer of the "Note" has not attempted a critical estimate of the poetry, some of these Appreciations, forming a part of the poet's life-history and even of the literary history of his time, are here reproduced.

Mr Francis Thompson is a writer whom it is impossible that any qualified judge should deny to be a "new poet." And while most poets of his quality have usually to wait a quarter of a century or more for adequate recognition, this poet is pretty sure of a wide and immediate acknowledgement.... 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.... The Hound of Heaven has so great and passionate and such a metre-creating motive, that we are carried over all obstructions of the rhythmical current, and are compelled to pronounce it, at the end, one of the very few "great" odes of which the language can boast. In a lesser degree this metre-making passion prevails in the seven remarkable pieces called Love in Dian's Lap, poems of which Laura might have been proud, and Lucretia not ashamed, to have had addressed to her. The main region of Mr Thompson's poetry is

the inexhaustible and hitherto almost unworked mine of Catholic philosophy. Not but that he knows better than to make his religion the direct subject of any of his poems, unless it presents itself to him as a human passion, and the most human of passions, as it does in the splendid ode just noticed, in which God's long pursuit and final conquest of the resisting soul is described in a torrent of as humanly impressive verse as was ever inspired by a natural affection. Mr Thompson places himself, by these poems, in the front rank of the pioneers of the movement which, if it be not checked, as in the history of the world it has once or twice been checked before, by premature formulation and by popular and profane perversion, must end in creating a "new[Pg 136] heaven and a new earth."—Coventry Patmore, in The Fortnightly Review.

It is not only the religious ecstasy of Crashaw that they recall; for all the daringly fantastic imagery, all the love-lyrical hyperbole, all that strange mixture and artifice, of spontaneous passion and studied conceit, which were so characteristic of the age of Crashaw, are with the same astonishing fidelity reproduced. Where, unless, perhaps, in here and there a sonnet of Rossetti's, has this sort of sublimated enthusiasm for the bodily and spiritual beauty of womanhood found such expression as in Love in Dian's Lap between the age of the Stuarts and our own? To realize the full extent to which the religious, or semi-religious, emotions—now ecstatic, now awe-stricken—dominate and colour the entire fabric of these strange poems, they must be read throughout. In the lines To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster we see them at their subtlest; and in the very powerful piece, The Hound of Heaven—a poem setting forth the pursuit of the human soul by divine grace—they are at their most intense.... That minority who can

recognize the essentials under the accidents of poetry, and who feel that it is to poetic Form alone, and not to forms, that eternity belongs, will agree that, alike in wealth and dignity of imagination, in depth and subtlety of thought, and in magic and mastery of language, a new poet of the first rank is to be welcomed in the author of this volume.—H. D. Traill, in The Nineteenth Century.

The first thing to be done, and by far the most important, is to recognize that we are here face to face with a poet of the first order, a man of imagination all compact, a seer and singer of rare genius. He revels indeed in "orgiac imageries," and revelry implies excess. But when excess is an excess of strength, the debauch a debauch of beauty, who can condemn or even regret it? Would we had a few more poets who could exceed in such imagery as this! It is no minor Caroline singer he recalls, but the Jacobean Shakespeare.—The Daily Chronicle.

A volume of poetry has not appeared in Queen Victoria's reign more authentic in greatness of utterance than this. In the rich and virile harmonies of his line, in strange and lovely vision, in fundamental meaning, he is possibly the first of Victorian poets, and at least is he of none the inferior.... In all sobriety do we believe him of all poets to be the most celestial in vision, the most august in faculty.... In a word, a new planet has swum into the ken of the watchers of the poetic skies. These are big words; [Pg 137] but we have weighed them. For there is that in Mr Francis Thompson's poetry which discourages the flamboyant appreciations of the more facile impressionist, and gives him pause in his ready-made enthusiasms. It is patent on the first page that there is genius in this inspiration, and the great note in this utterance; but page after page reveals the rich and the strange, and the richer and the stranger in so many original moods and noble measures, that the reviewer feels the necessity of caution.... In nothing does Thompson appear more