The “Narrow and Hard, Suffering (thlibó) Pathway” of Francis Thompson’s poem, “The Hound of Heaven”: From the '“harvest fields” of addiction and destitution
[Reading Time: 6 minutes]
[For the text of the poem click here; for an astonishing recitation of the poem by Tom O’Bedlam, see here; and for a short documentary of the poem’s composition, this is well worth the time.]
In the winter of 1887, Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, the editor of a minor Catholic literary magazine called Merry England, received a strange parcel. It contained an essay and some poems with an attached cover letter:
When Meynell befriended Thompson over the ensuing months and years, he came to learn the story of his life and poetry and understand what, exactly, he meant by the “strange places and circumstances under which it has been written.”
From a failed pathway in the priesthood to failures in medicine and an illness that left him an opiate addict
As the son of a provincial doctor with his mother dying when he was young, Thompson was sent at the age of eleven to Ushaw College, a Catholic seminary near Durham, England, where, he excelled in English and essay writing, yet in mathematics he finished last. Though graduating from Ushaw, in 1877, the Thompsons received a letter from the president of the college, directing Thomas away from the priesthood:
Upon returning home to “prepare for some other career,” his father pushed him into medicine, sending Thomas to Owens College (now the University of Manchester), where he would spend the next eight years in study. During his enrollment at Owens, however, Thompson became ill with what would later be diagnosed as tuberculosis and, in the end, be the cause of his death. Following a lengthy febrile illness, he was prescribed laudanum, the liquid form of opiates, prepared by dissolving extracts from the opium poppy in alcohol (which, interestingly enough, was first developed by the eminent Christian physician, Thomas Sydenham, known as the English Hippocrates).
His physical symptoms were relieved; yet the seeds of addiction were planted.
Amidst the burden of his ailment together with what would be a growing opiate addiction, Thomas failed his medical examinations in 1879, then again in 1881 and for a third and final time in 1884. As such, he was forced to return home from Owens college to live with his family, for the next time a failure. His inability to hold down a job soon resulted in rising tensions with his, no doubt, results-driven-physician father. Tensions mounted and finally Thompson left his home for good, now driven by a goal of pursuing not the acceptable middle-class professions, but a career in writing and poetic composition.
Departure to London with his decent into addiction and destitution
Following a heated argument with his father, Thompson made the final break with his family and departed for London. He arrived there on a cold December day in 1885, days before his 26th birthday. He had only two books, a few spare clothes and little money to his name. And while his family had arranged for an allowance to be paid to him each week, his laudanum habit left him functionally incompetent to go and actually collect it. The ensuing months thus witnessed his steady descent into destitution on the streets of London.
Though he struggled to support himself and his habit by working, he passed from one odd job to the next, with each being more desperate. He began delivering orders for a London bookseller, then worked as an assistant in a boot shop, then calling cabs (i.e. holding horses while their owners got off and on), and finally, selling matches on the streets. By this period, his supply of money gradually disappeared, leaving him totally destitute. Without food or lodging, he spent the days in the Guild Hall library (until eventually being forced to leave due to his filthy, bedraggled state) and the nights sleeping in various homes for the poor, under arches, or with the homeless on the Thames’ embankment.
He was, in the words of the Hound of Heaven, in the midst of his early years of flight:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
Connection with Meynell and the first publications of his poetry
Yet, in the midst of his flight, he had begun writing, composing. And he was eventually led to make his way to 43 Essex St, where, due to his lack of money for postage, he dropped off by hand a small parcel of writings in the Merry England letter box along with a letter he had written, dated Feb 23, 1887, there to pass on to “the struggle of life”:
Wilfred Meynell was affected deeply by the collection of tattered poems (the first including such poems as "Dream-Tryst", written in memory his mother, and "Paganism Old and New"), such that he not only published selections from this work, but also he and his wife befriended Thompson, taking him into their own home. Their daughter, Viola (who, interestingly enough, later engineered the publishing of Moby Dick as the first American novel in the Oxford World's Classics series in England, writing the introduction to that volume), would later write in a published collection of their family’s letters,
When Thompson was asked to write more and to accept a small weekly sum for subsistence, he refused the help; but the invitation to write was for him like a possible key to true life and my father’s friendliness had made its mark. Mr. Thompson came again to the office, and at that time subjects for Merry England articles were discussed.
The slow and steady confrontation with addiction
As Thompson was brought into their home, they then became first-hand witnesses of the ravages of opiate dependence and addiction, which was at its height following his time on the streets. After much persuasion, Meynell convinced Thompson to see a doctor. Ironically, however (and to this—what may be called “acceptable, professional insanity” which we in the medical profession can well attest), the doctor told them first that Thompson was on the verge of death; and second, that opium was medically necessary to slow that approach.
In spite of this professional medical opinion, however, Meynell and Thompson decided that the risk of continued laudanum use outweighed the perceived medical benefit. As such, Meynell arranged for him to be admitted to a private hospital, where he was successfully tapered off opiates. With laudanum gone, he was reduced, as has been noted, to a “shell of a man, emotionally and physically and mentally.” Concerned that “if he returned it to the streets of London, he would take up the laudanum habit again,” the decision was made, therefore, to bring him to Our Lady of England Priory, Storrington, where “he could be kept under the watchful eye of the monastic brothers while he fully recuperated and recovered from his addiction.”
In his first letter to his benefactor from the priory, Thompson wrote
Dear Mr. Meynell,
With regard to my illness, there is nothing to be alarmed about. It is severer and more obstinate than I had hoped would be the case, but is a mere matter of holding on. I have hopes that the thing may gradually be loosening its hold upon me. I think I shall like this place when I begin again to like anything.
From holding on to entering in
When the “physical craving and mental obsession” of laudanum addiction did, in fact, loosen their grip, he began to experience in the community—in the Body—a “spiritual awakening.” While in the abbey, “breathing the air of the Storrington countryside, surrounded and uplifted by the monks’ prayers and readings from the Psalms and the Gospels,” Thompson would begin composing his greatest and most beloved poem, "The Hound of Heaven.” And five months after moving back to London near the Meynells, the poem was published in Merry England.
His flight was being halted.
(For, though I knew His love Who followèd,
Yet was I sore adread
Lest having Him, I must have naught beside).
But, if one little casement parted wide,
The gust of His approach would clash it to.
Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.
And when Love pursued, Thompson’s eyes were opened to the vanity of his attempts to escape:
Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet,
And a Voice above their beat—
‘Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.’
The change, the transformation…in the crushing
And then the beginnings, the stirrings of a change began to happen as his descent continued still further.
I knew all the swift importings
On the wilful face of skies;
I knew how the clouds arise
Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings;
All that’s born or dies
Rose and drooped with; made them shapers
Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine;
With them joyed and was bereaven.
I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day’s dead sanctities.
I laughed in the morning’s eyes.
Yet his descent opened a portal to eternity where healing, his Healer, was approaching.
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy;
And past those noisèd Feet
A voice comes yet more fleet—
‘Lo! naught contents thee, who content’st
not Me.’
Yet he had, nevertheless, to continue the descent.
As Mary before him.
As Stephen.
As Anthony of the Desert and as Mary of Egypt.
As Augustine.
As Rutherford.
As Therese.
As Spurgeon.
As every one truly blessed with the eternal light that comes into This Fallen realm in the form of darkness, internalized within our minds/hearts/spirits/nous as true poverty of spirit.
Yet Why?
That we may come through it to know the terrifying depths of Christ’s forgiving and redeeming and restoring love that penetrates even into the eternal abyss of sin and pain and suffering.
For there is, finally, no other way.
“Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.
But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little”
Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!
My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
And smitten me to my knee;
I am defenceless utterly.
I slept, methinks, and woke,
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
Yet again, just when we think that our breaking is complete, there arises within us little stirrings of the recalcitrant pride of our old man, still whispering into our ears to fuel the delusion of defiant strength.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
Until it all crumbles into dust.
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years—
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
Yea, faileth now even dream…
And in the dust o’ the mounded years, in the mess of mangled youth, there is born, is given, is received a new heart—one that is now, finally, broken and crushed (shabar and dakah); yet not crushed for crushing’s sake (that would be our vain, little performative work with no transformative power); but rather crushed with the eternal crushing of the Divine Healer Himself.
That our hearts may be co-crucified. co-dead. co-buried (systauróō, apothnḗskō sýn, syntháptō)
With Christ.
For it is only in this heart that Christ comes to dwell:
For thus says the High and Lofty One
Who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:
“I dwell in the high and holy place,
With him who has a contrite (dakka) and humble spirit,
To revive the spirit of the humble,
And to revive the heart of the contrite (daka) ones (Is 57:15).
My freshness spent its wavering shower i’ the dust;
And now my heart is as a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
Such is; what is to be?
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity.
Where there is revealed an unmerited, all-embracing Love
‘And human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited—
Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’
Epilogue
Published in 1890, Francis' poem was called by the Bishop of London "one of the most tremendous poems ever written," and by critics "the most wonderful lyric in the language," while the Times of London declaring that people will still be learning it 200 years hence.
So His verse continued to elicit high praise from critics right up to his last volume in 1897 with G.K. Chesterton speaking of him as a “great poet,” Fraill as "a poet of the first order," George Meredith, “a true poet, one of a small band” with Damozel writing of his poetry that '“no mystical words have so touched me." His selected poems published in 1908 contains about 50 pieces in all. Notable among his prose works are an essay on Shelley, "The Life of St. Ignatius", and "Health and Holiness".
Francis Thompson died, after receiving all the sacraments, in the excellent care of the Sisters of St. John and St. Elizabeth, aged forty-eight.