The news comes to me on a little black-edged card that Francis Thompson
died at dawn on November 13, 1907. He was a Roman Catholic, and we are
asked to pray for his soul. It was a light that death could not put out,
a torch that no wind could blow out in the darkness. From us indeed it
is now turned away, and that little corner of the world to which the
poet gives light is darkened.
For Francis Thompson was one of the few poets now or lately living in
whom there was some trace of that divine essence which we best symbolize
by fire. Emptiness he had and extravagances, but he was a poet, and he
had made of many influences a form of new beauty. Much of his speech,
which has a heaped imagery unique in our time, seems to have learned its
technique from an almost indiscriminate quarrying among old quarries,
and is sometimes so closely copied from that which was fantastically
precise in Crashaw, Donne, Vaughan, that we wonder why it was not a few
centuries ago that some one said:
Life is a coquetry
Of Death, which wearies me,
Too sure
Of the armour;
A tiring-room where I
Death's divers garments try,
Till fit
Some fashion sit.
No one since that time, when "conceits" could convey poetical substance,
has touched so daintily on plain words, giving by the touch some
transfiguring novelty. If it was a style learned, it was a style
perfectly acquired, and at times equal to its original.
Words and cadences must have had an intoxication for him, the
intoxication of the scholar; and "cloudy trophies" were continually
falling into his hands, and half through them, in his hurry to seize and
brandish them. He swung a rare incense in a censer of gold, under the
vault of a chapel where he had hung votive offerings. The incense half
obscures the offerings, and the dim figures of the saints painted on the
windows. As he bows there in the chapel he seems to himself to be in
"reverberant Eden-ways" or higher, at the throne of heaven, borne on
"plumes night-tinctured, englobed and cinctured of saints." Passing
beyond the world he finds strange shapes, full of pomp and wearing
strange crowns; but they are without outline, and his words disguise,
decorate, but do not reveal them.
When he chanted in his chapel of dreams, the airs were often airs which
he had learned from Crashaw and Patmore. They came to life again when he
used them, and he made for himself a music which was part strangely
familiar and part his own, almost bewilderingly. Such reed-notes and
such orchestration of sound were heard no where else; and people
listened to the music, entranced as by a new magic.
When he put these dreams and this music into verse, with a craft which
he had perfected for his own use, the poetry was for the most part a
splendid rhetoric, imaginative and passionless, as if the moods went by,
wrapped in purple, in a great procession. _The Hound of Heaven_ has the
harmonies of a symphony, and there are delicacies among its splendors,
and, among instants of falsely fanciful sentiment, such august moments
as this:
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.
It is full of fine and significant symbolism, it is an elaborate pageant
of his own life, with all its miseries, heights, relapses, and flight
after some eternity; but, as he writes it, it turns intellectual, and
the voice is like that of one declaiming his confession. It was not thus
that Christina Rossetti let us overhear a few of the deepest secrets of
her soul.
The genius of Francis Thompson was oriental, exuberant in color woven
into elaborate patterns, and went draped in old silken robes that had
survived many dynasties. The spectacle of him was an enchantment; he
passed like a wild vagabond of the mind, dazzling our sight. He had no
message, but he dropped sentences by the way, cries of joy or pity, love
of children, worship of the Virgin and saints and of those who were
patron saints to him on earth; his voice was heard like a wandering
music, which no one heeded for what it said, in a strange tongue, but
which came troublingly into the mind, bringing it the solace of its old
recaptured melodies. Other poets of his time have had deeper things to
say, and a more flawless beauty; others have put more of their hearts
into their song; but no one has been a torch waved with so fitful a
splendor over the gulfs of our darkness.