Selected Poems of Francis Thompson Part 1

Selected Poems of Francis Thompson.

by Francis Thompson.

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:

He lives detached days; He serveth not for praise; For gold He is not sold.

He asketh not world's eyes; Nor to world's ears he cries-- Saith, "These Shut, if ye please!"

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, 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:

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!

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 t.i.tle page of _Tracts_ which, perhaps because for their own Times, seem a.s.suredly for no other. The seven years Francis Thompson pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sics. After Ushaw he went to Owens College, to qualify for his father's profession; in his preliminary examination 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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:

The hardest pang whereon He lays his mutinous head may be a Jacob's stone.

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

_Arras'd in purple_ like the house of kings, the regal heart that comes at last To stall the grey rat, and the carrion-worm Statelily lodge.

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. "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 aeschylus 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 a.s.sistantship 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 bookseller 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 Suss.e.x 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. 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 G.o.dchild_--all in the first book of _Poems_; while two of their number have a n.o.ble 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:

I fear to love you, Sweet, because Love's the amba.s.sador of loss.

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 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 p.r.o.nouncements 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 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 "Sh.e.l.ley 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 s.e.x, 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?

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 pa.s.sers' 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, I 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 pa.s.sed,--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.

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. 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 pa.s.sed, during his life, into book form--the complaint made by Brother a.s.s, the Body, against its rider, the Soul. This was published under the t.i.tle 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 sc.r.a.pbook. Later, his contributions to _The Athenaeum_ 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 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 pa.s.sed 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.

The Dedications

DEDICATION OF "POEMS"

To WILFRID AND ALICE MEYNELL

If the rose in meek duty May dedicate humbly To her grower the beauty Wherewith she is comely; If the mine to the miner The jewels that pined in it; Earth to diviner The springs he divined in it; To the grapes the wine-pitcher Their juice that was crushed in it; Viol to its witcher The music lay hushed in it; If the lips may pay Gladness In laughters she wakened, And the heart to its sadness Weeping unslakened; If the hid and sealed coffer Whose having not his is, To the loosers may proffer Their finding--here this is; Their lives if all livers To the Life of all living,-- To you, O dear givers, I give your own giving!

DEDICATION OF "NEW POEMS" To COVENTRY PATMORE

Lo, my book thinks to look Time's leaguer down Under the banner of your spread renown!

Or, if these levies of impuissant rhyme Fall to the overthrow of a.s.saulting Time, Yet this one page shall send oblivious shame, Armed with your crested and prevailing Name.

Poems on Children

DAISY

Where the thistle lifts a purple crown Six foot out of the turf, And the harebell shakes on the windy hill-- O the breath of the distant surf!--

The hills look over on the South, And southward dreams the sea; And, with the sea-breeze hand in hand, Came innocence and she.

Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry Red for the gatherer springs, Two children did we stray and talk Wise, idle, childish things.

She listened with big-lipped surprise, Breast-deep 'mid flower and spine: Her skin was like a grape, whose veins Run snow instead of wine.

She knew not those sweet words she spake, Nor knew her own sweet way; But there's never a bird so sweet a song Thronged in whose throat that day!

Oh, there were flowers in Storrington On the turf and on the spray; But the sweetest flower on Suss.e.x hills Was the Daisy-flower that day!