To a Poet Breaking Silence
To a Poet Breaking Silence
Too wearily had we and song
Been left to look and left to long,
Yea, song and we to long and look,
Since thine acquainted feet forsook
The mountain where the Muses hymn
For Sinai[1] and the Seraphim.
Now in both the mountains' shine
Dress thy countenance, twice divine!
From Moses and the Muses draw
The Tables of thy double Law!
His rod-born fount and Castaly[2]
Let the one rock bring forth for thee,
Renewing so from either spring
The songs which both thy countries sing:
Or we shall fear lest, heavened thus long,
Thou should'st forget thy native song,
And mar thy mortal melodies
With broken stammer of the skies.
Ah! let the sweet birds of the Lord
With earth's waters make accord;
Teach how the crucifix may be
Carven from the laurel-tree,
Fruit of the Hesperides[3]
Burnish take on Eden-trees,
The Muses' sacred grove be wet
With the red dew of Olivet,
And Sappho[4] lay her burning brows
In white Cecilia's[5] lap of snows!
Thy childhood must have felt the stings
Of too divine o'ershadowings;
Its odorous heart have been a blossom
That in darkness did unbosom,[6]
Those fire-flies of God to invite,
Burning spirits, which by night
Bear upon their laden wing
To such hearts impregnating.
For flowers that night-wings fertilize
Mock down the stars' unsteady eyes,
And with a happy, sleepless glance
Gaze the moon out of countenance.
I think thy girlhood's watchers must
Have took thy folded songs on trust,
And felt them, as one feels the stir
Of still lightnings in the hair,
When conscious hush expects the cloud
To speak the golden secret loud
Which tacit air is privy to;
Flasked in the grape the wine they knew,
Ere thy poet-mouth was able
For its first young starry babble.
Keep'st thou not yet that subtle grace?
Yea, in this silent interspace,
God sets His poems in thy face!
The loom which mortal verse affords,
Out of weak and mortal words,
Wovest thou thy singing-weed in,
To a rune of thy far Eden.
Vain are all disguises! Ah,
Heavenly incognita![7]
Thy mien bewrayeth through that wrong
The great Uranian House of Song!
As the vintages of earth
Taste of the sun that riped their birth,
We know what never cadent Sun
Thy lamped clusters throbbed upon,
What plumed feet the winepress trod;
Thy wine is flavorous of God.
Whatever singing-robe thou wear
Has the Paradisal air;
And some gold feather it has kept
Shows what Floor it lately swept!
The Homeless Poet
Thompson was raised in a Catholic family near Manchester. With his father a doctor, Thompson went to university to follow in his father’s vocation. He excelled in Latin and essay writing but failed his math exams. Breaking connection with home because of his failure, he ventured, penniless, to London. He was living on the street, performing odd jobs just to survive, and developing a strong opium addiction, the consequences of which he would struggle for the rest of his life. For three years he lived in a drug-induced state, selling matches, yet still finding time to write on scraps of paper that he found. His life experience with the homeless of Victorian London would later be reflected in many of his works of poetry.In 1888, he submitted a dirt-soiled manuscript to the Catholic journal Merry England edited by Wilfred Meynell with no return address simply because Thompson had none to give. Seeing Thompson’s potential as a writer, Meynell searched him out and welcomed him into his home. Thompson would continue to be connected to the Meynell family, so much so that Wilfred’s son Everard would eventually write Thompson’s biography. Concerned about the destructiveness of Thompson’s addiction, they paid for a place for him at Capuchin monasteries. Thompson was immersed in the liturgy and recited psalms of the friars. During this time, most of his poetry was composed, including his most famous work “The Hound of Heaven.” The first edition of Poems was published in 1893.
Thompson's Poetic Style
The language of Thompson’s poetry is simultaneously expressive and complex. Coventry Patmore, who was a poet himself, wrote a review of Thompson’s book Poems.One way that Thompson’s poetry finds its complexity is in its referential nature. In “To a Poet breaking Silence,” there are connections Thompson draws between the idea of the mythical muses and God’s inspiring of the Law. Inspiration and divine intervention tie the two references together. There is a motif the speaker explores on the aspect of renewal in poetry. Some scholars look to Thompson’s biblically driven verse as a reflection of a growing reinterest in mysticism among Catholic literary communities.The metre affords incomparable facilities for the expression of a strong feeling….During the last fifteen years, or so this measure, after it long disuse, has been attempted by almost every writer in verse; but nearly all have failed,…Of all these modern experimentalists, Mr. Thompson is, to my thinking the only one who has, in some large measures, succeeded notwithstanding his want of practice and his occasion defects and redundancies of language.
Many of the themes expressed in Thompson’s poems are in the tension between knowing the Infinite while living every day in the finite. In an essay to honor Thompson after his death, G.K. Chesterton writes:
The significance of Thompson’s poetry in his struggle to reconcile the extraordinary (biblical truths) with the ordinary (life’s experience).Great poets use the telescope and also the microscope. Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons; now, because that are talking about something too large for any one to understand, and now again because they are talking about something too small for any one to see. Francis Thompson possessed both these infinities.
Bibliography and Recommended Reading
Boardman, Brigid. Between Heaven and Charing Cross: the Life of Francis Thompson. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
Chesterton, G.K. “A Dead Poet” In All things Considered. New York: John Lake Company,
1909. Accessed Nov. 9, 2020, https://archive.org/stream/considered00chesuoft#page/276/mode/2up.
Frederic, Mary Catherine. “The Franciscan Spirit as Revealed in the Literary Contributions of Francis Thompson.”Franciscan Studies 11, no. 1 (1951): 21-39. Accessed December 14, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41974454.
Meynell, Everard. The Life of Francis Thompson. London: Burns & Oates, 1913. Accessed Nov.
11, 2020, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112099793660&view=1up&seq=189.
Patmore, Coventry. “Mr. F. Thompson, A New Poet.” The Fortnightly Review 61(Jan.-June.
1894): 19-24. Accessed Nov. 9, 2020, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924066515143&view=1up&seq=36.
Thompson, Francis. Poems. 2nd ed. London: E. Mathews & J. Lane, 1894. Accessed Nov. 12,
2020. https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/WsU_AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1
Thomson, P. van Kuykendall. Francis Thompson: A Critical Biography. New York: Nelson.
1961.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN0iq1yzrTk [1] Sinai is the mountain where God gave the law to Moses. See Exodus 19-20.
[2] Proper name of a spring on Mount Parnassus, sacred to the Muses; often used allusively.
[3] The nymphs from Greek Mythology, daughters of Hesperus, who were fabled to guard, with the aid of a watchful dragon, the garden in which golden apples grew in the Isles of the Blest
[4] A prolific Geek poet, Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BC) is considered a great lyric poet and was even named the “Tenth Muse”.
[5] Possibly a reference to St. Cecilia (c. 200 – c.235 AD), who was said to be martyred by Roman prefect Turcius Almachius. She is the patroness of musicians.
[6] To bring out from the heart; to disclose, reveal
[7] Unknown things or places.