Part 1 (1/2)

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 Lancas.h.i.+re 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 distinguis.h.i.+ng 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.sistants.h.i.+p 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.