thous and thees and titanic glooms and whatnot - Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven"

For the next week and a half, Wuthering Expectations will be vacationing.  No posts on vacation.

I did not mention that Francis Thompson wrote cricket poetry.  The sport, not the insect.  Talk about obscure.  I will ignore those in favor of his unusual religious poems.  Every poem I quoted yesterday was a religious poem, so I mean more religious poems, ones I understand.

The clearest, to me, is “’In No Strange Land,’” a vision of the “world invisible” as it operates on earth, specifically in London.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry; - and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

And Christ is “walking on the water / Not of Geneserath, but Thames!”  I think “thou” and “thy” are referring back to the poet, but that is just a guess.  It is the specificity of the angels in London that I am enjoying here, “[t]he drift of pinions… at our own clay-shuttered doors.”  But then I wonder what “clay-shuttered” might mean.  If I just quote Thompson lines from which I understand every word, I won’t have much to quote.

Thompson’s masterpiece, “The Hound of Heaven,” is more abstract but succeeds in suggesting the sinful life of the speaker, who feels that Christ is a wild animal in pursuit of him, and who, if he catches the poet, will kill him, perhaps by eating his heart. 

Whether man’s heart or life it be which yields
       Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
       Be dunged with rotten death?

So the poet flees:

            Up vistaed hopes I sped;
            And shot, precipitated
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
    From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

The poet indulges in the pleasures of this world, asking nature to display herself naked to him, in a passage that has not aged so well.  The results are ugly:

In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
         I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years –
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.

The Hound, at the end of the poem, explains that the traumas suffered by the poet are not caused by the Hound but by the flight from it.  The poet is Catholic, but the psychology of the poem, the fear that a spiritual experience can be a source of terror or harm, is more general.  Not universal, perhaps, but common.  It is the vision that drives a number of Flannery O’Connor characters, this frightening sense that the Hound will save them but in the process murder them.

I scouted around for O’Connor writing about “The Hound of Heaven” and found something quite funny, a 1963 letter wondering if youngsters should be kept from “The Hound of Heaven.”

Probably what he means about impounding “The Hound of Heaven” is that it ought not to be set up as THE type of religious poetry – lest the students think they had to have thous and thees and titanic glooms and whatnot in all religious poetry.  I wouldn’t impound “The Hound of Heaven,” but I would impound “Trees” early on.  Our pastor has a piece of bad verse to decorate most every sermon, all of which I feel sure was supplied him in some Catholic grammar school.

The sideswipe crack at Joyce Kilmer, another poet in the line of Patmore and Thompson, is pretty choice.

A Francis Thompson tasting - Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit

Another pale aesthete of the 1890s today, Francis Thompson, as represented in the 1908 Selected Poems that followed his death at age 47 from tuberculosis.  The anonymous author of the book’s biographical note calls him “this aloof moth of a man” (p. vii).  He and Ernest Dowson are the English ur-poets of the 1890s.  Thompson was a homeless opium addict, kept alive by a prostitute with a heart of gold who, once he was taken up as a poet, renounced him so as not to damage his reputation, after which he became a kind of monk.

None of that is remotely believable.  How I would laugh if I were tricked into seeing a movie about this character.  What nonsense, what clichés!

And I have not even gotten to his poetry, which is unbelievable in its own way.  Thompson was a baroque Catholic poet, in the line of Richard Crashaw and Coventry Patmore, who became Thompson’s great champion.  Thompson is wilder than Patmore, and as befits a baroque poet he more often veers into bad taste.

Thou fill'st thy mouth with nations, gorgest slow
On purple aeons of kings; man's hulking towers
Are carcase for thee, and to modern sun
Disglutt'st their splintered bones.  (From “An Anthem of Earth,” p. 109)

Is that awful or magnificent?  “Disglutt’st.”  Some fragments from “A Corymbus for Autumn”:

            Suffer my singing,
Gipsy of Seasons, ere though go winging;
            Ere Winter throws
            His slaking snows
In the feasting-flagon’s impurpurate glows!

***

            Thy mist enclip
Her steel-clear circuit illuminous,
            Until it crust
            Rubiginous
With the glorious gules of a glowing rust.

Am I mocking Thompson?  Only a little.  I admire his audacity with the language – “Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit” (“Her Portrait,” 40), yes, that’s the spirit – but then I have trouble taking him seriously.  He is a grapey poet (“Her skin was like a grape, whose veins / Run snow instead of wine,” “Daisy,” 1).  As is typical with baroque modes, Thompson’s poems face two constant problems, obscurity and kitschiness. 

Yea, not a kiss which I have given,
But shall triúmph upon my lips in heaven,
Or cling a shameful fungus there in hell.

***

Thou to thy spousal universe
Art Husband, she thy Wife and Church;
Who in most dusk and vidual curch,
Her Lord being hence,
Keeps her cold sorrows by thy hearse.  (“Orient Ode,” pp. 92 & 94)

The poem is addressed to the sun, rising in the east; “she,” the wife, is the Earth; the last three lines are a way of saying that it is dark at night.  The Christian allegory is made explicit only at the end.  Looking back at the poem, perhaps most of its obscurity just comes from its length – who can follow seven pages of that stuff.  The most kitschy bit, by the way, although “shameful fungus” is tempting, is the accent mark in “triúmph.”

Thompson may at this point survive as the author of one poem, the dense, harrowing “The Hound of Heaven,”  a masterpiece that could not have been written by a poet afraid of “impurpurate glows” and “disglutt’st” and making a single line out of “rubiginous.”  Thompson “[s]ublimed the illuminous and volute redundance” (“A Child’s Kiss,” 16).  I guess. I probably don’t understand that line.

I have notes with many more lines as good, let’s say, as these.  But I will give Thompson another day and will try to do something more than just swish his verse around in my mouth.