Chapter I: Front Matter

SELECTED POEMS OF
FRANCIS THOMPSON

Selected Poems
_of_ Francis Thompson

With a Biographical Note by
Wilfrid Meynell

LONDON

METHUEN AND CO. LTD. BURNS AND OATES LTD.
Essex Street Orchard Street
W.C. W.

The Twenty-fifth
Thousand

THE CONTENTS

Frontispiece: Portrait of FRANCIS THOMPSON A Note on FRANCIS THOMPSON _Page_ ix The Dedications xix, xx

POEMS ON CHILDREN
Daisy 1
The Poppy 3
To Monica Thought Dying 6
The Making of Viola 9
To my Godchild 12
Ex Ore Infantium 14

From SISTER SONGS
A Child's Kiss 16
Poet and Anchorite 20
The Omen 22
The Mirage 24
The Child-Woman 26
To a Child heard repeating her Mother's Verses 28
A Foretelling of the Child's Husband 31

LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP
Before her Portrait in Youth 33
To a Poet Breaking Silence 35
A Carrier Song 37
Her Portrait 39
Epilogue to the Poet's Sitter 45
After her Going 47

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS
A Fallen Yew, 48
The Hound of Heaven, 51
To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster, 57
A Dead Astronomer, 63
A Corymbus for Autumn, 64
From "The Mistress of Vision", 69
The After Woman, 72
Lines: To W.M., 74
The Way of a Maid, 75
Ode to the Setting Sun, 76
Epilogue to "A Judgement in Heaven", 86
Grace of the Way, 87
To a Snowflake, 88
Orient Ode, 89
From "From the Night of Forebeing", 96
A Counsel of Moderation, 101
From "Assumpta Maria", 102
From "An Anthem of Earth", 105
Contemplation, 112
Correlated Greatness, 114
July Fugitive, 115
From "Any Saint", 118
From "The Victorian Ode", 124
St Monica, 127
To the Sinking Sun, 128
Dream-Tryst, 129
Buona Notte, 130
Arab Love Song, 131
The Kingdom of God, 132
Envoy, 134

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 detachèd 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 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 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:

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 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 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 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. 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:

I fear to love you, Sweet, because
Love's the ambassador 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 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 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?

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 barbèd minutes at me;
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
In night's slow-wheelèd 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 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.

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 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 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._

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 assaulting 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 Sussex hills
Was the Daisy-flower that day!

Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face!
She gave me tokens three:--
A look, a word of her winsome mouth,
And a wild raspberry.

A berry red, a guileless look,
A still word,--strings of sand!
And yet they made my wild, wild heart
Fly down to her little hand.

For, standing artless as the air,
And candid as the skies,
She took the berries with her hand,
And the love with her sweet eyes.

The fairest things have fleetest end:
Their scent survives their close,
But the rose's scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose!

She looked a little wistfully,
Then went her sunshine way:--
The sea's eye had a mist on it,
And the leaves fell from the day.

She went her unremembering way,
She went, and left in me
The pang of all the partings gone,
And partings yet to be.

She left me marvelling why my soul
Was sad that she was glad;
At all the sadness in the sweet,
The sweetness in the sad.

Still, still I seemed to see her, still
Look up with soft replies,
And take the berries with her hand,
And the love with her lovely eyes.

Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in others' pain,
And perish in our own.

THE POPPY

To MONICA

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.

With burnt mouth red like a lion's it drank
The blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank,
And dipped its cup in the purpurate shine
When the eastern conduits ran with wine;

Till it grew lethargied with fierce bliss,
And hot as a swinkèd gipsy is,
And drowsed in sleepy savageries,
With mouth wide a-pout for a sultry kiss.

A child and man paced side by side,
Treading the skirts of eventide;
But between the clasp of his hand and hers
Lay, felt not, twenty withered years.

She turned, with the rout of her dusk South hair,
And saw the sleeping gipsy there;
And snatched and snapped it in swift child's whim,
With--"Keep it, long as you live!"--to him.

And his smile, as nymphs from their laving meres,
Trembled up from a bath of tears;
And joy, like a mew sea-rocked apart,
Tossed on the wave of his troubled heart.

For _he_ saw what she did not see,
That--as kindled by its own fervency--
The verge shrivelled inward smoulderingly:

And suddenly 'twixt his hand and hers
He knew the twenty withered years--
No flower, but twenty shrivelled years.

"Was never such thing until this hour,"
Low to his heart he said; "the flower
Of sleep brings wakening to me,
And of oblivion memory.

"Was never this thing to me," he said,
"Though with bruisèd poppies my feet are red!"
And again to his own heart very low:
"O child! I love, for I love and know;

"But you, who love nor know at all
The diverse chambers in Love's guest-hall,
Where some rise early, few sit long:
In how differing accents hear the throng
His great Pentecostal tongue;

"Who know not love from amity,
Nor my reported self from me;
A fair fit gift is this, meseems,
You give--this withering flower of dreams.

"O frankly fickle, and fickly true,
Do you know what the days will do to you?
To your Love and you what the days will do,
O frankly fickle, and fickly true?

"You have loved me, Fair, three lives--or days:
'Twill pass with the passing of my face.
But where _I_ go, your face goes too,
To watch lest I play false to you.

"I am but, my sweet, your foster-lover,
Knowing well when certain years are over
You vanish from me to another;
Yet I know, and love, like the foster-mother.

"So, frankly fickle, and fickly true,
For my brief life-while I take from you
This token, fair and fit, meseems,
For me--this withering flower of dreams."

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!

Love, love! your flower of withered dream
In leavèd rhyme lies safe, I deem,
Sheltered and shut in a nook of rhyme,
From the reaper man, and his reaper Time.

Love! _I_ fall into the claws of Time:
But lasts within a leavèd rhyme
All that the world of me esteems--
My withered dreams, my withered dreams.

TO MONICA THOUGHT DYING

You, O the piteous you!
Who all the long night through
Anticipatedly
Disclose yourself to me
Already in the ways
Beyond our human comfortable days;
How can you deem what Death
Impitiably saith
To me, who listening wake
For your poor sake?
When a grown woman dies,
You know we think unceasingly
What things she said, how sweet, how wise;
And these do make our misery.
But you were (you to me
The dead anticipatedly!)
You--eleven years, was 't not, or so?--
Were just a child, you know;
And so you never said
Things sweet immeditatably and wise
To interdict from closure my wet eyes:
But foolish things, my dead, my dead!
Little and laughable,
Your age that fitted well.
And was it such things all unmemorable,
Was it such things could make
Me sob all night for your implacable sake?

Yet, as you said to me,
In pretty make-believe of revelry,
So, the night long, said Death
With his magniloquent breath;
(And that remembered laughter,
Which in our daily uses followed after,
Was all untuned to pity and to awe).
"_A cup of chocolate,
One farthing is the rate,
You drink it through a straw._"

How could I know, how know
Those laughing words when drenched with sobbing so?
Another voice than yours, than yours, he hath!
My dear, was 't worth his breath,
His mighty utterance?--yet he saith, and saith!
This dreadful Death to his own dreadfulness
Doth dreadful wrong,
This dreadful childish babble on his tongue!
That iron tongue, made to speak sentences
And wisdom insupportably complete,
Why should it only say the long night through,
In mimicry of you,--
"_A cup of chocolate,
One farthing is the rate,
You drink it through a straw, a straw, a straw!_"

Oh, of all sentences,
Piercingly incomplete!
Why did you teach that fatal mouth to draw,
Child, impermissible awe
From your old trivialness?
Why have you done me this
Most unsustainable wrong,
And into Death's control
Betrayed the secret places of my soul?
Teaching him that his lips,
Uttering their native earthquake and eclipse,
Could never so avail
To rend from hem to hem the ultimate veil
Of this most desolate
Spirit, and leave it stripped and desecrate,--
Nay, never so have wrung
From eyes and speech weakness unmanned, unmeet;
As when his terrible dotage to repeat
Its little lesson learneth at your feet;
As when he sits among
His sepulchres, to play
With broken toys your hand has cast away,
With derelict trinkets of the darling young.
Why have you taught--that he might so complete
His awful panoply
From your cast playthings--why,
This dreadful childish babble to his tongue,
Dreadful and sweet?

THE MAKING OF VIOLA