‘The Hound of Heaven’ by Francis Thompson, Poet of Grace

"Hound of Heaven" is Francis Thompson's most famous poem. "A Limier Briquet Hound," by Rosa Bonheur. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain

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.

So begins “The Hound of Heaven.” The narrator of this poem is a fugitive, a man on the run—not from the law but from God. The hound of heaven is, of course, God himself. This attempted evasion is the simple premise of “The Hound of Heaven.”

Though Francis Thompson wrote and published other verse and prose during his lifetime, it is “The Hound of Heaven” for which he is remembered. It brought him to the attention of the public, and won the praise of several writers.

Francis Thompson had a short life but was devoted to writing. Shown here at the age of 19. Public Domain

Following Thompson’s death, for instance, G.K. Chesterton said of him, “With Francis Thompson we lose the greatest poetic energy since Browning.” J.R.R. Tolkien was an admirer, and American playwright Eugene O’Neill memorized “The Hound of Heaven” in his youth. For decades, it was a classroom staple in Catholic schools.

Both Thompson and his poems have lost some of their luster among the literati of our own time. His intricate language and his religious themes may repel some modern readers. The length of some of his works—“The Hound of Heaven” runs to 182 lines—may also constitute a barrier, particularly when it comes to placement in anthologies. Neither the Sixth Edition of “Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama” nor the Second Edition of “Prentice Hall Literature: The English Tradition” (both of which sit on my bookshelves) contains the poem.

Oddly, however, given his once sterling reputation, neither of these literary surveys makes any mention of the poet whatsoever.

Hard Times and Rescuers

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) was born in Lancashire, England, the son of a doctor and a book-loving mother. After receiving his education at Ushaw, a Catholic school where he was known as somewhat shy and reclusive, a lover of literature who avoided games, he entered Owens College to follow in his father’s footsteps and study medicine. Though he spent six years there, Thompson disliked his studies, and after failing to pass his final exams, he dropped out. In 1885, he headed to London, determined to become a writer.

In that city of strangers, bad luck and his own lack of worldliness plagued him. Like many others of his time, he became addicted to laudanum, perhaps originally taking this form of opium as a relief from a nervous condition. For three years, he lived hand-to-mouth, destitute and often homeless, working odd jobs like selling matches or hailing cabs, so shabbily dressed at one point that a public library closed its doors to him.

But he did write. In 1887, he sent three poems to Wilfrid Meynell, editor of a Catholic magazine called Merry England. Thompson’s accompanying letter begins: “Dear Sir,—In enclosing the accompanying article for your inspection, I must ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript. It is due, not to slovenliness, but to the strange places and circumstances under which it was written.” Meynell published one of the poems, “The Passion of Mary,” finally tracked down the poet, and gained his confidence and friendship.

Eventually, Meynell and his wife, Alice, who was a poet and mother of eight, took Thompson into their home for a time. Though he later found lodgings of his own, he remained a frequent visitor in the Meynell household. For the rest of his life, the Meynells and some of their friends watched after Thompson, encouraging him, supervising his health, and tending to him when the tuberculosis that afflicted him left him prostrate and dying. As an article in the Catholic Encyclopedia tells us, “He was never again friendless or without food, clothing, shelter, or fire.”

It was after meeting Wilfrid Meynell that Thompson wrote “The Hound of Heaven.”

Fox and Hound

Near the beginning of the poem, God pursues the fugitive soul with “unhurrying chase,/ And unperturbed pace,/ Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,” then says, “All things betray thee,/ Who betrayest Me.”

This sense of holy calm and deliberation, maintained throughout the poem, stands in stark contrast to the pursued, who frantically seeks pleasure, refuge, and love without God. Yet time and again the Hound of Heaven appears, reminding him that “Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.” At the end, having caught the man whose “heart is as a broken fount,” God tells him “Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!” The poem ends, “‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,/ I am He Whom thou seekest!/ Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’” (“Dravest” is an archaic past tense form of drive.)

In Thompson’s poem, this omniscient being, all-powerful and all-loving, knows his quarry, the soul, better than the soul knows itself. He comes to bring peace to the world-weary man and to fill the empty places of his heart.

Other writers have used similar images of hunter and hunted to portray God. In “The Innocence of Father Brown,” for example, G.K. Chesterton has Father Brown say of a thief: “I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

G.K. Chesterton used the hunter and hunted motif in his Father Brown stories. Illustration by Sydney Seymour Lucas for "The Innocence of Father Brown." Public Domain

In Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” a young woman, Cordelia, quotes this line, and Waugh underscores its importance to his novel by naming Part III “A Twitch Upon the Thread.” As scholar of English literature Annesley Anderson writes in her essay on “Brideshead” and the role of grace in the lives of its characters, “no one on this thread is ever far from God, or from each other, and that God’s grace is what surrounds and makes sense of the whole world.”

Thompson would undoubtedly have said the same about his “Hound of Heaven.”

Kindnesses Repaid

The tender mercies of others rescued Francis Thompson from the London streets where he lived, suffered, and nearly died. Without the attentions and affections of the Meynell family, the poet might have ended his days unknown and unsung, relegated to a bed of earth in potter’s field.

In “Sister Songs,” Thompson pays homage to the kindness of the Meynell family, in particular to their two young daughters, Sylvia (Madeline) and Monica. The innocence of the Meynell children and the love they showed to Thompson provided the inspiration for much of the poetry written in those productive years while living in the care and keeping of this generous family.

In this same volume of verse, Thompson also expresses his gratitude to another “sister,” a prostitute who observed him in his rags and hunger, pitied him, and brought him to her quarters. There she restored him to a semblance of health. The exact nature of their relationship remains unknown, as does the name of the woman herself. Everard Meynell, the son of Wilfrid and Alice, relates an incident that left him with the impression that Thompson and his benefactor lived as innocents, close friends, and confidants, two sparrows of the streets come together for comfort. When Thompson told this woman of Wilfrid Meynell’s interest in his writing, she explained to him that she would be an impediment in his new life. Soon afterward, he arrived at their rooms to find that she had vanished, never again to be seen. In “Sister Songs,” he writes:

And of her own scant pittance did she give, That I might eat and live: Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.

A Memorial Made of Words

In the opening of “Francis Thompson: A Reflection on the Poetic Vocation,” now regrettably out of print, Frank Morriss relates of Thompson’s death that “it was reported by his nun-nurses that the poet had repeatedly spoken the words, ‘My withered dreams, my withered dreams.’”

Those words come from Thompson’s verse “The Poppy,” dedicated to Monica Meynell. The last stanza reads:

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.

We cannot know what Thompson may have meant with these dying words, though we can discern why he is so little read today. His verse is often obscure, its lines laden with unfamiliar or archaic words. Read aloud, the haunting beauty of his verse comes alive, but most of us take our poetry in silence. The God who inhabits these poems sometimes seems farther away from us than he did to readers a century ago. Consequently, Thompson’s poems may appear to some like a half-completed bridge, stretching from the Victorian era back to the metaphysical poets like John Donne, but lacking the girders and pilings to reach the shore of our own century.

And yet there are his poems, only a finger touch away on our electronic devices, standing as a memorial to the man and to the God in whom he believed.