This week’s choice is “The Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson. It is a great poem, written by a man who plumbed the depths of Victorian England and chronicles his struggles with, and discovery of, God’s love.
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
Francis Thompson (1859—1907)
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.
Poem 216. The Hound of Heaven
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. 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 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.
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd 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 blossoms 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 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.’
I sought no more that after 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 daïs,
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 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.
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 gray 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 unperturbèd 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 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.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
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
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 amaranthine 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-glimpsèd 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.’
This is a long poem that I discovered through Richard Burton’s reading on a tape. I found Burton’s sonorous tones lent the reading a tremendously impressive atmosphere.
The poem shows a narrator who initially shuns the love of God, flees and is pursued, seeks concealment and protection in different ways before eventually admitting defeat and accepting his creator’s love. That’s an incredibly brief summary that does disservice to a beautiful poem.
Thompson’s imagery is stunning—the narrator’s flight in the first stanza, though only a flight of fancy as it were, travels through time (“down the nights and down the days…down the arches of the years”) and into the world of his own mind: “and in the midst of tears/I hid from Him, and under running laughter”. Hopes are vistaed, apparently blessed with fabulous views, while fears are great gloomy chasms.
The sense of pursuit is emphasised by the repeated text:
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
This isn’t an out-and-out chase: the pursuer keeps a leisurely but relentless pace, and the narrator must keep moving (mentally at least). His pursuer speaks, telling the narrator that he can expect no help from others, as long as he betrays God.
In the second stanza, the narrator tries to seek shelter from his pursuer, appealing to his estranged people (“I pleaded, outlaw-wise”), the stars and moon (“Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars; fretted to dulcet jars/And silvern chatter the pale ports of the moon”) and the dawn and dusk (“With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over/From this tremendous Lover”— Lover used here with a capital letter to indicate that it is God to whom he refers and that rather than the traditional love between humans, this is the love that God is offering to the narrator). We then get a marvellous bit of verse where the narrator speaks of how his temptations fail against the constancy of God’s servitors:
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.
I think that’s brilliant.
Though he petitions the swiftest creatures for assistance, there is no succour: “Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue”—the phrase “Fear lent wings to his feet” seems appropriate but his fear is not as strong as the Love following him and he is told that he can expect no shelter if he will not shelter God. Wist is the past participle of the archaic verb ‘wit’ meaning to know, be aware of.
Knowing that adults are forewarned against him, he looks for the unconditional love that children bring but they also are barred to him (“Their angel plucked them from me by the hair”) and he resolves that love of animals shall sustain him (“Come then, ye other children, Nature’s”):
Banqueting
With her in her wind-walled palace,
Underneath her azured daïs
Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
From a chalice
Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring.
He revels in the instinctive world of brute creatures (“made them shapers/Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine;”) and the natural forces of creation (“I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,/Heaven and I wept together,/And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;”), but all the time he knows that this is a pale imitation of human life since although he can speak to these animals, they do not respond and neither does the natural world of wind, water and stone. His pursuer draws nearer and nearer, declaring that nothing will content the narrator if he does not content God.
With nowhere to turn, our narrator turns to face the blow, stripped of whatever protection his mind has contrived (“Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!”—a powerful image, this, the idea of love as a weapon to be withstood, conveying the resistance he still feels).
The blow does not seem to fall though, and waking after sleep, he pulls the tattered threads of his existence together, feeling age beginning to touch him now his youth has been wasted in flight:
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me: grimed with smears,
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.
He ponders whether God’s love is such a demanding growth that it must stifle all else (“Ah! is Thy love indeed/A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed”)—just as a draughtsman must burn the charcoal he works with before it can be used (“must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?”).
His energy fades and he despairs (“the dank thoughts that shiver/Upon the sighful branches of my mind”): what will happen next? If his existence now is bitter, how can it be better after death? Although he imagines what the afterlife might be and seems to catches glimpses of the Almighty, he questions why he must die (“Whether man’s heart or life it be which yields/Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields/Be dunged with rotten death”).
At the last, his pursuer’s voice is all around him, surging like a great ocean, and he is told that everything flees from him, because he flees from God.
God upbraids the narrator, saying that he is little worthy of love and nobody but God will love him as he is:
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 has 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?
God now reveals that everything the narrator thought was lost had only been stored for him, and bids him stand, clasp His hand and go with Him. The pursuing feet come to a standstill and the narrator comes to the realisation that the gloom in which he has lived is only the shadow of God’s hand raised in welcome, and his creator’s voice affirms in the last lines of the poem:
‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’
All along, rather than being the quarry of a hunter, he had himself been hunting for the conclusion he now realises: it is he who drove God, and therefore love, away from himself.
I like this poem because it is a beautiful object fashioned with great care and skill and you don’t have to believe in God or any deity to appreciate the gorgeous way Thompson has with words. The poem was praised by G.K. Chesterton and it inspired J.R.R. Tolkien, amongst others. Thompson had been homeless and addicted to laudanum before he wrote The Hound of Heaven, and it shows how great art can come from the most trying and adverse circumstances.