The Poetry of Thompson by Francis Thompson

First published:Poems, 1893; Sister Poems, 1895; New Poems, 1897

Critical Evaluation:

Francis Thompson’s poetry resulted from the tortured and tormented mind of a man maladjusted to the world. The son of a successful father with whom he could have little in common, he was a failure in his studies to become a Catholic priest and later a physician. Self-exiled from home, he wandered to London, where, ground down into the direst degradation and poverty and forced to subsist on the inadequate fare he could earn by selling matches on the street, he nevertheless grew in spiritual fervor and integrity.

His first poems, growing out of a promising youth of effort, were published in April, 1888, in Merry England, a magazine edited by Wilfrid Meynell, who with his beautiful and talented wife Alice was to have great influence on the personal and poetical life of the poet. These early works include numerous poems about children. One of these, Thompson’s first on the subject, is named “Daisy.” The poem flirts with the obviously sentimental but rises above it. The poet meets the little girl, in a Wordsworthian fashion, walks with her, like two children walking side by side. When she leaves her walking partner after a short time, he remembers the joy of their companionship and the poignancy of parting, but he reconciles himself with the thought that sadness is the price of all happiness.

Thompson’s first volume of poetry, POEMS, was well received. Spurred on by enthusiastic reviews in numerous magazines, the volume startled the Victorian audience who reacted with approval or shock. It was immediately evident that a poet of considerable power was writing. His verse form was unconventional, running from clipped lines of one word to unusually long ones. The vocabulary was exotic, even bizarre, including old forms of usual words and outlandish coined terms. Latinisms abounded. Most important of all, however, was the powerful mysticism that had energized the great works of the earlier Metaphysical poets, John Donne and Richard Crashaw. William Blake’s influence is also immediately evident in several of the poems, as in “Little Jesus,” which parallels in subject matter, treatment and rhythms the earlier poet’s “The Lamb.”

Thompson’s second volume, SISTER SONGS, did not meet with the success of the earlier volume. Even the author held reservations about its publication. In approach and language that marks no advance over the previous volume, it catalogues Thompson’s love affair—which seems to have been genuine—with the daughter of his landlord.

Another of Thompson’s love affairs, entirely chaste and worshipful, is chronicled in “Love in Dian’s Lap,” begun the year of publication of “The Hound of Heaven.” The sequence is made up of poems written about Alice Meynell, the wife of his first publisher, who was herself a poet and a beautiful and charming woman. In Thompson’s mystic, powerful style she becomes far more than an earthly woman. She is his spirit, soul, his Heaven. In “A Carrier Song,” the poet says that she has “waned” from him and left him in a “darkened cage.” Another, “Her Portrait” reveals his approach, his power, and his reaching back to the technique of the Metaphysical poets. The poet wishes that he had the “heavenly grammar” which “angels’ tongues” turn to gold. To praise her soul “All must be mystery and hieroglyph.” He catalogues her beauties, ending with the statement that in the contemplation of her eyes there is “Passionless passion, wild tranquillities.” In another sensuous-mystical statement, “Domus Tua,” Thompson states that the perfect woman should be praised because her body is God’s Temple, and he will be glad to say at Doomsday that he loved the beauty of that House.

Evidence of the fact that Thompson could never write very far from his own experience—limited as that was—nor on any subject but himself is seen in the elegy, written at the request of Wilfrid Meynell, on the death of the Cardinal of Westminister, with whom Thompson had been loosely associated. The poem begins on the theme of the dead clergyman but almost immediately turns to the poet himself, who is contrasted in his failure with the Cardinal in his success. Thompson was “ex-Paradised” and not tall enough to lean against the Cardinal’s Christ. Death, which was ever close to Thompson with his tuberculosis and intermittent addiction to opium, moves nearer here than usual, as he says in one of his simple and powerful lines that the grave is in his blood.

The wide range of Thompson’s poetry is further revealed in two works quite different in subject matter and in treatment. “The Fair Inconstant” is a love poem in the same mode and treatment as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” which ends with Shakespeare’s statement that it is his poem that will eternally give life to the subject of his song. Thompson’s begins with the same kind of statement, asking his love if she thinks her beauty will live after it has ceased being beautiful to him. He feels that he made her fair, his heart did tint her cheek with beauty, and she will eventually discover that he looked her “into loveliness.”

Such a delicate poem is successful. “Cecil Rhodes” is in every way a failure. The poem catalogues the glories of this great man, his saving Africa for England, and finally devolves into chauvinism in its appeal for “Colonies on Colonies” to cling to the skirt of Mother England and thus be wise.

Among the various influences on Thompson, both immediate and remote, one of the most powerful was Coventry Patmore. Thompson indicates this influence in the dedication to his last volume, NEW POEMS. The book will attempt to outface Time under the banner of Patmore’s renown, and if it fails, then one page at least, the dedication, will survive, “armed” with his great name.

Of all Thompson’s poems, none has the appeal and power of his most widely known work, “The Hound of Heaven,” completed during the poet’s residence in London from 1890 to 1892, and translated into most languages of the world and generally admired. Written by a man who wanted to become a priest but was denied this way to serve God, the poem chronicles the rejected man’s pell-mell flight to other consolations. He fled God “down the nights and down the days” and through the “labyrinthine ways” of his own mind. Even when assured of “His love Who followed,” he continued to run for fear that God’s love would exclude all other things from life. God’s voice behind insisted that nowhere could the pursued find shelter except in Him. Excluded from men and women, he turned to children, but they were snatched from him. He turned to nature but his heart was not eased. And the insistent voice asserts that nothing can content the poet that does not content God. At the end of the long flight, the “long pursuit,” the poet discovers that he is so “ignoble,” so worthless, that only God will love him. All the certainties of life, the rest and peace, were taken from man so that he would “seek” it in God’s “arms.” All rest and certainty is “stored” for man “at home.” The poem ends in a glorious affirmation of faith and certitude.

Thompson’s later work, after NEW POEMS, consisted mostly of reviewing and criticism, which was weak and inferior. Generally, the verse he wrote was also a failure, vitiated by his weakening powers, his advanced tuberculosis, and his reliance on opium.