Wow - it is much harder to find time to write now that I'm back at work, but I shall have a pop at it! If this is a bit stream of consciousness, I apologise.
I'm sure I could expect a chorus of agreement when I begin by saying that some of the best things in life come along while you're on the loo. In our smallest room, we have a selection of 'lavatory literature'. Included are some childrens' books, anthologies and curiosities, a wonderful book called
How to Read a Church which I bought on one of our travels in England, and a staggeringly hilarious book of geniune names from centuries past called
Potty, Fartwell and Knob. It's the most genuinely lavatorial book of the lot, as befits its lofty location.
We add and subtract to this loo library from time to time, and Hannah recently added a hitherto neglected favourite of ours: a BBC book called
The Nation's Favourite Poems. It might be populist, but golly, do jewels just pour from its pages! (say that last sentence in a 'luvvie' voice, for maximum effect).
One evening, while, settling myself for a lengthly reign on the porcelain throne, I began to scan the index of the book, when one title caught my eye. It was a poem called The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson. I don't know about you, but when I come to read a poem, I long to find something that I can connect with - a word, phrase, sentiment which the author chooses that expresses something I too know, believe in, trust. As the film Shadowlands put it: 'we read to know we're not alone'. The spiritual promise of the word Heaven certainly drew me in... but perhaps also the roughness, the strength of the word Hound. Anyway, I turned to it, and began to read.
Sometimes my spirit soars when I read a poem - and this is one of these. Glory! I love discovering a new creation. I imagine it's something like a botanist feels on discovering a new species of plant, or a dinosaur hunter on discovering a whole new set of bones which suggest T Rex had feathers, or whatever! The wonder! But I think for me, the real joy in the slaking of the artistic thirst is in that sense that I am connected with another human being beyond my time, outwith my physical reach. I want to leave art like that in the world. I want people to listen or read or remember and feel "yes - here is someone who felt as I feel, and we share that now". Is that a humble enough ambition?
Anyway, on to the poem. I won't reproduce the whole text here. There is a link to the whole thing with explanatory notes here:
http://cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides3/hound.html
The poem tells of a man who runs from God, but God pursues him - the Hound of the title - although God is never referred to as Hound in the body of the poem itself. It is starkly honest about our reasons for running from God. For example, the fear that, should we choose God, we will lose what we already have:
For though I knew His love Who followèd,
..........Yet was I sore adread,
Lest having Him, I should have naught beside)
There are terrible admissions of the author's desire for God's followers to fail and somehow show God to be unworthy, all expressed in rich, deep paradoxes:
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.
The protagonist then goes on to seek satisfaction in other human beings, and then in Nature, but ultimately, neither is capable of quelling his longing, or putting off the One who pursues him:
those strong Feet that followed, followed after
..........But with unhurrying chase
..........And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
In vain he tries to shut it out, but:
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea
In the end, he capitulates. And man, the words God speaks to him are like sweet, glorious arrows in my breast:
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."
Those lines just DESTROYED me.
I hope you can see the majesty of this work, even from those brief quotations, which don't at all show the life-sweep of the poem in its full merit. Go find that link and read the whole thing. Do it now! You won't regret it!
Thompson himself seems to me an elusive, almost mythical figure. He was born in 1859 in Preston, Lancashire, trained in medicine, hated it, and promptly dropped out of society all together, living rough for a time on the streets of London. He soon became an opium addict. He sent some poems into a Catholic magazine (the implausably-titled
Merry England) but having no fixed abode, Thompson gave as his address, that of the post office. The editor, a Mr Wilfrid Meynell, was so impressed with the poems that he attempted to contact Thompson, but was unable to reach him. The only way Meynell could get through to Thompson was by publishing his work! Eventually an address was obtained of a certain local chemist, where Meynell discovered Thompson owed a large amount of money for opium. Meynell squared the bill, and was pointed to a man selling matches in the street. This man was Francis Thompson.
Meynell then took Thompson under his wing, arranging a stay at a monastery where he kicked his opium habit (althought his would be a lifelong struggle with addiction) and got to work writing and publishing poems. It was during a stay in the Norbertine monastery of Storrington in 1889 that he wrote the Hound of Heaven. The rest of Thompson's life seems to have been tough, if no longer materially, then certainly psychologically. The details I could find online are sketchy, but he seems to have been an extremely sensitive, melancholic soul, prone to depression and periodic lapses into drug dependancy. He died of tuberculosis on 13 November 1907. He was 47.
Certain hints suggest that his struggles and failings were to some extent airbrushed out of his story by contemporaries. One writer even claims that Meynell edited his poems to make them 'more Catholic'. (Indeed, the version in the
Nation's Favourite Poems is heavily abridged - I was surprised, although not a little delighted, to find an adittional 2 verses online!)
Books on Thompson seem fairly thin on the ground. A recent scholarly monograph is, alas, way out of my price range. So he remains a rather mysterious figure - and one that strikes me as having many of the hallmarks of contemporary tragic celebrity - middle-class upbringing, rebellious youth, near-destitution, drug addiction, 'discovery' by benevolent benefactor, spells in and out of the Priory, untimely death. It's all rather rock 'n' roll, in perhaps the worst, and the yet most intriguing sense.
In any case, the reality of his spiritual experience, as laid bare in the desperately beautiful Hound of Heaven, elevates him in my opinion, beyond a luridly tragic myth.
I know only too well the sobbing, petulant, ignoble, child in my own breast who tries to hide from God. I ran and ran from God, but when I in desperation turned my head, he was right at my shoulder. He'd been running after me all the time and I never knew it.
God, in his wisdom, allows us to play this game of hide-and-seek. He patiently waits, like the good and patient Father he is, counting to one hundred, as we rush to fussily conceal ourselves, our true selves. Thompson reminds us that we do our hiding in all kinds of places. And not the least of these hiding places is our own mind.
Submission to God is a strange thing. When we submit to God, it is a moment when we are both at our most humiliated and our most dignified. It's
our moment on our own cross of Calvary. It is when we cry out, as Jesus did: "My God My God Why have you forsaken me". It is at that moment of terrible emptiness that God rushes in like a torrent of passion and fills us to overflowing.
Somehow, we have to go through it - the grief, the loss, the tears of rage, the desperate pumelling of our puny fists on the opressive ceiling of our human understanding; but when, exhausted, we finally surrender to the Patient Pursuer of Peace, when we finally cry out: 'I am caught, I am caught!', then God reveals just enough to make us collapse in loving gratitude.
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.
Are you on the run from God? How long will you run, before you turn and run into His arms?
