He gave me a copy of the following poem put out in booklet form. It was an extroadinary poem, one which I greatly admire, but one that takes some effort to understand in its entirety.
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| THE HOUND OF HEAVEN |
| Francis Thompson |
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 midst of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes I sped; And shot, precipitated, Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. But with unhurrying chase, And unperturbèd pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, They beat—and a Voice beat More instant than the Feet— 'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me'. I pleaded, outlaw-wise, By many a hearted casement, curtained red, Trellised with intertwining charities; (For, though I knew His love Who followed, 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. Across the margent of the world I fled, And troubled the gold gateway of the stars, Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars; Fretted to dulcet jars And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon. I said to Dawn: Be sudden—to Eve: Be soon; With thy young skiey blossom heap me over From this tremendous Lover— Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see! I tempted all His servitors, but to find My own betrayal in their constancy, In faith to Him their fickleness to me, Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit. To all swift things for swiftness did I sue; Clung to the whistling mane of every wind. But whether they swept, smoothly fleet, The long savannahs of the blue; Or, whether, Thunder-driven, They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven, Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet:— Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue. Still with unhurrying chase, And unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, Came on the following Feet, And a Voice above their beat— 'Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.' I sought no more after that which I strayed In face of man or maid; But still within the little children's eyes Seems something, something that replies, They at least are for me, surely for me! I turned me to them very wistfully; But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair With dawning answers there, Their angel plucked them from me by the hair. Come then, ye other children, Nature's—share With me’ (said I) 'your delicate fellowship; Let me greet you lip to lip, Let me twine with you caresses, Wantoning With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses, Banqueting With her in her wind-walled palace, Underneath her azured dais, Quaffing, as your taintless way is, From a chalice Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring.’ So it was done: I in their delicate fellowship was one— Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies. 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 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. I triumphed and I saddened with all weather, Heaven and I wept together, And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine: Against the red throb of its sunset-heart I laid my own to beat, And share commingling heat; But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart. In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek. For ah! we know not what each other says, These things and I; in sound I speak— Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences. Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth; Let her, if she would owe me, Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me The breasts o’ her tenderness: Never did any milk of hers once bless My thirsting mouth. Nigh and nigh draws the chase, With unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy; And past those noisèd Feet A voice comes yet more fleet— 'Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me.' Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke! My harness piece by piece Thou has 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. In the rash lustihead of my young powers, I shook the pillaring hours And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears, I stand amidst 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 The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist; Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist, Are yielding; cords of all too weak account For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed. Ah! is Thy love indeed A weed, albeit an amarinthine weed, Suffering no flowers except its own to mount? Ah! must— Designer infinite!— Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it? 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; Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again. But not ere him who summoneth I first have seen, enwound With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned; His name I know and what his trumpet saith. Whether man's heart or life it be which yields Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields Be dunged with rotten death? Now of that long pursuit Comes on at hand the bruit; That Voice is round me like a bursting sea: 'And is thy earth so marred, Shattered in shard on shard? Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me! 'Strange, piteous, futile thing! Wherefore should any set thee love apart? Seeing none but I makes much of naught' (He said), '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.' |
Site Link: http://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/HNDHVN.HTM
Hounded by Amazing Grace
July-August 2000By Ruth Clements
Ruth Clements is Lecturer of Advanced Writing in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
The Hound of Heaven at My Heels: The Lost Diary of Francis Thompson. By Robert Waldron. Ignatius. 93 pages. $8.95.
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….
Thus begins “The Hound of Heaven,” Francis Thompson’s autobiographical poem. Like St. Augustine’s Confessions, it is also a spiritual testament, a creative reconstruction of his journey to faith and grace — how a loving God saved a wretch like him.
The figure of a Hound as a metaphor for God likely struck initial readers as strange — too daring and bizarre. But when the Catholic poet Thompson (1859-1907) read Shelley’s “Heaven’s Winged Hound” and juxtaposed that startling image with Confessions (a work he had all but memorized; it had haunted him, hounded him, for years), he knew that he had struck spiritual gold: “Thank you, Jesus, for sending me the insight that does not blind but illuminates.” In writing this hymn of God’s love for His children, Thompson would find his soul’s treasure, his true vocation: He was to illuminate, through his poetry, the darkened souls of those who were still trying — vainly, furiously — to escape God, the Hound of Heaven. “Although I might flee from God, God would seek me to the ends of the earth.”
In Thompson we hear the echo of St. Augustine in his tortured youth: “For to me then you were not what you are, but an empty phantom, and my error was my god…. For where could my heart fly to, away from my heart? Where could I fly to, apart from my own self? Where would I not pursue myself?”
And we hear Milton’s Satan: “Me miserable! which way shall I fly/ Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?/ Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”
In “The Hound of Heaven,” Thompson describes his hell: “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.” But, like St. Augustine, he surrenders himself at last — as a child, tolle lege, tolle lege — into God’s embrace.
Robert Waldron’s The Hound of Heaven at My Heels is a novel, a creative reconstruction of Thompson’s lost diary. It interweaves fact and fiction to breathe new life into a man Waldron considers “one of England’s great poets.” Waldron gets inside Thompson, assuming the poet’s voice and using his verse, to allow us penetrating glimpses — in the form of brief diary entries — into Thompson’s soul.
The poet’s spiritual journey is thus captured in snapshots; a pilgrim’s progress that leaves the biographical-narrative norm behind in favor of something that feels more immediate and intimate. This literary technique is a gamble that rarely pays off. But, on the whole, Waldron wins. Not every hand, mind you. Some of the diary entries are embarrassing: “My Anne who said, ‘The first time I saw you I knew you were a genius.’ ‘How?’ I asked, amused. ‘Your fine brow and eyes proclaim it,’ she said.” But this is a rare clunker — Victorian Romantic Goo. The following entries are more typical:
“Why is it so difficult to admit wrongdoing? Pride, first my opinion that I was above other mortals and then my opinion that I was below them. At long last I can see the truth about us all: ordinary until touched by God’s grace.”
“I have vowed to Jesus to follow exactly the Liturgy of the Hours. Time sanctified is time transcended, and only in such time shall I vanquish my life’s enslavement.”
And this entry (which gets to the heart of Thompson’s self-imposed hell): “My first ingestion of opium was an act of full consent of the will. I was cognizant of the dangers of lifetime enslavement, but I hoped the visionary splendor would nourish my poetic power, and this was of great importance to me. Thereafter my opium drinking was no longer a complete act of the will, for my body developed its own will counter to that of my mind and soul. Oh, how I understand Saint Paul’s lamentation, ‘for the good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not I do.’ Saint Francis named his body Brother Ass. My own body has been more like a faithful canine, faithful to one master: opium. I am plagued by the axiom that an old dog cannot be taught new tricks….”
Wallowing in the mire and scratching lust’s itchy sore is a hoary theme; and the soulful saga of Lost & Found is trite. But to dismiss this diary as a series of clichés would be injudicious. Perhaps it is more on point to reflect on the nature of the central cliché — the stubbornness of human nature — that St. Paul summed up so powerfully in his lament. How tyrannical is the perversity of our wills! Why do we have to be dragged — kicking and screaming like raging adolescents — to God? Waldron/Thompson writes, “There is no escape from God. But then I bewitched myself to believe in escape and nearly destroyed myself by self-delusion.”
It behooves us as Catholic readers, as all-too-human beings, to not be shy about the shadows of Thompson’s life. Who would throw the first stone? If not opium, then what particular evil bedevils each of us? (I am writing this with nicotine ricocheting through my veins. Yea, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death last year, and swore off this destructive escape, still I do the very thing I hate.) Self-delusion is powerful in its subtlety — a sneaky snake sidewinding its way inside the soul. But at least addiction is a devil one can wrestle down. As C.S. Lewis displayed so splendidly in The Screwtape Letters, spiritual pride is the sliest sidewinder of them all.
Thompson was too honest for spiritual pride — he knew and named his demons: opium, an imagination run amok, self-will run riot. During his year-long retreat at a monastery, Thompson began writing “The Hound of Heaven” while struggling mightily against the chaos that haunted his life: “I sat the night staring through my casement at the insane eye of the moon. The opium in my drawer repeatedly whispered to me. My hand reached out to the drawer’s handle. After beseeching Mary Immaculate for a half hour, I was able to resist one more time.”
Whether or not one buys into Waldron’s opinion that Thompson is one of the great English poets, this fictional diary nevertheless succeeds in its purpose of putting the reader into the poet’s teeming mind so as to witness both the turbulence of his soul and the yearned-for spiritual pax he found at the monastery.
The Hound of Heaven chases us. Inside us two wills duel. We want to be caught and, perversely, we want to escape. But to flee is to die. “For without you,” wrote St. Augustine, “what am I to myself but the leader of my own destruction?” In The Hound of Heaven at My Heels, Robert Waldron is telling us to pay attention, to stay alert, to be mindful that Francis Thompson’s struggles are our own. It is the story of the soul’s brutal and exhausting civil war — upon which hangs the nature of our eternity.
Site Link: http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0700-clements
Personal Comment:
From the outset, the poem makes reference to the fact that Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, Creator of all that is, seeks after us, pursues us, even when we flee Him. He reaches out to us, tries to bring us back to Him. He sent His Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, to redeem us through His sacrifice of death on the Cross, and His Resurrection.
What was the cause of this 'flight' from God? "For, though I knew His love...Yet was I sore adread Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside". This is the crux of the problem, not that God is unknown, nor that what God asks for from us is too much, but that in accepting Christ into our lives, we must enter whole-hog into a living, personal relationship with God, and put aside earthly concerns and desires, and instead place full confidence in God to succour and comfort us. It is this all-or-nothing attitude that so many of us hesitate against. We want to have that assurance of eternal life, but we want it to begin at the moment of our death here on Earth. In other words, we don't want any conditions or limitations placed on us as we pass theough this Earthly life. We want the best of both worlds, but we are too stubborn or too short-sighted to understand that through acceptance of Jesus Christ and committment to living the Christian life here on Earth, we get the very best of everything, now and forever. That does not mean that the road will be easy. Jesus called His disciples to 'take up their cross daily and follow Him'. If we can do this, surely we are partakers in Christ's "one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world". (BCP Prayer of Consecration)
Our flight is in vain. Thompson's words ring loudly in the conscience of our soul: "Naught shelters thee, who will not shelter Me." And again, "Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me." And yet again, " Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!" It is not until we realize "how little worthy of any love" we are that we begin to make progress toward accepting the saving Grace offered to us through the power of the Holy Spirit. Even at this point of greatest despair, God is there. He reaches out His hand for us to take. "Rise, clasp My hand, and come." It is then, and only then, that we come to the final realization that our fight and flight has been all in vain. What we sought has really been the face of God, who throughout the many years of our life, has pursued us, reaching out His hand so many times in offering to us, His forgiveness, love, salvation and eternal bliss.
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