Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play;
Go, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow:
And some are sung, and that was yesterday,
And some unsung, and that may be to-morrow.
Go forth; and if it be o'er stony way,
Old joy can lend what newer grief must borrow:
And it was sweet, and that was yesterday,
And sweet is sweet, though purchasèd with sorrow.
Go, songs, and come not back from your far way;
And if men ask you why ye smile and sorrow,
Tell them ye grieve, for your hearts know To-day,
Tell them ye smile, for your eyes know To-morrow.
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_Appreciations of Francis Thompson_
_"Such pronouncements proved at least that a poet, who had
no friend save such as his published poems gained for him,
could count on an immediate recognition for high merit. For
these tributes, and many more of like welcoming, placed him
instantly out of range of the common casualties of
criticism."--From the_ "NOTE ON FRANCIS THOMPSON" (p. xii).
_As the writer of the "Note" has not attempted a critical
estimate of the poetry, some of these Appreciations, forming
a part of the poet's life-history and even of the literary
history of his time, are here reproduced._
Mr Francis Thompson is a writer whom it is impossible that any
qualified judge should deny to be a "new poet." And while most poets of
his quality have usually to wait a quarter of a century or more for
adequate recognition, this poet is pretty sure of a wide and immediate
acknowledgement.... We find that in these poems profound thought,
far-fetched splendour of imagery, and nimble-witted discernment of
those analogies which are the roots of the poet's language, abound ...
qualities which ought to place him in the permanent ranks of fame, with
COWLEY and with CRASHAW.... _The Hound of Heaven_ has so great and
passionate and such a metre-creating motive, that we are carried over
all obstructions of the rhythmical current, and are compelled to
pronounce it, at the end, one of the very few "great" odes of which the
language can boast. In a lesser degree this metre-making passion
prevails in the seven remarkable pieces called _Love in Dian's Lap_,
poems of which LAURA might have been proud, and LUCRETIA not ashamed,
to have had addressed to her. The main region of MR THOMPSON'S poetry
is the inexhaustible and hitherto almost unworked mine of Catholic
philosophy. Not but that he knows better than to make his religion the
direct subject of any of his poems, unless it presents itself to him as
a human passion, and the most human of passions, as it does in the
splendid ode just noticed, in which God's long pursuit and final
conquest of the resisting soul is described in a torrent of as humanly
impressive verse as was ever inspired by a natural affection. MR
THOMPSON places himself, by these poems, in the front rank of the
pioneers of the movement which, if it be not checked, as in the history
of the world it has once or twice been checked before, by premature
formulation and by popular and profane perversion, must end in creating
a "new heaven and a new earth."--COVENTRY PATMORE, in _The Fortnightly
Review._
It is not only the religious ecstasy of CRASHAW that they recall; for
all the daringly fantastic imagery, all the love-lyrical hyperbole, all
that strange mixture and artifice, of spontaneous passion and studied
conceit, which were so characteristic of the age of CRASHAW, are with
the same astonishing fidelity reproduced. Where, unless, perhaps, in
here and there a sonnet of ROSSETTI'S, has this sort of sublimated
enthusiasm for the bodily and spiritual beauty of womanhood found such
expression as in _Love in Dian's Lap_ between the age of the Stuarts
and our own? To realize the full extent to which the religious, or
semi-religious, emotions--now ecstatic, now awe-stricken--dominate and
colour the entire fabric of these strange poems, they must be read
throughout. In the lines _To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster_ we see
them at their subtlest; and in the very powerful piece, _The Hound of
Heaven_--a poem setting forth the pursuit of the human soul by divine
grace--they are at their most intense.... That minority who can
recognize the essentials under the accidents of poetry, and who feel
that it is to poetic Form alone, and not to forms, that eternity
belongs, will agree that, alike in wealth and dignity of imagination,
in depth and subtlety of thought, and in magic and mastery of language,
a new poet of the first rank is to be welcomed in the author of this
volume.--H. D. TRAILL, in _The Nineteenth Century_.
The first thing to be done, and by far the most important, is to
recognize that we are here face to face with a poet of the first order,
a man of imagination all compact, a seer and singer of rare genius. He
revels indeed in "orgiac imageries," and revelry implies excess. But
when excess is an excess of strength, the debauch a debauch of beauty,
who can condemn or even regret it? Would we had a few more poets who
could exceed in such imagery as this! It is no minor Caroline singer he
recalls, but the Jacobean SHAKESPEARE.--_The Daily Chronicle._
A volume of poetry has not appeared in QUEEN VICTORIA'S reign more
authentic in greatness of utterance than this. In the rich and virile
harmonies of his line, in strange and lovely vision, in fundamental
meaning, he is possibly the first of Victorian poets, and at least is
he of none the inferior.... In all sobriety do we believe him of all
poets to be the most celestial in vision, the most august in
faculty.... In a word, a new planet has swum into the ken of the
watchers of the poetic skies. These are big words; but we have weighed
them. For there is that in Mr FRANCIS THOMPSON'S poetry which
discourages the flamboyant appreciations of the more facile
impressionist, and gives him pause in his ready-made enthusiasms. It is
patent on the first page that there is genius in this inspiration, and
the great note in this utterance; but page after page reveals the rich
and the strange, and the richer and the stranger in so many original
moods and noble measures, that the reviewer feels the necessity of
caution.... In nothing does THOMPSON appear more authentically a poet
than in the fact that his sense of beauty is part of his religion. In
this he is like SHELLEY, except that SHELLEY'S sense of beauty was his
religion, and lived in an atmosphere of sensuousness, a sensuousness
that has little of the grosser taints of earth about it indeed, but
which is still sensuousness. Therefore, SHELLEY wrote the glorious
_Epipsychidion_; therefore, Mr THOMPSON writes _Her Portrait_, the
longest and greatest poem in his book; and, speaking for ourselves, we
shall say at once that _Epipsychidion_, long unique in the language,
has at last found its parallel, perhaps its peer, in _Her Portrait_. Of
this "Her" of Mr THOMPSON'S we must say that she is the significance of
his book. If his sense of beauty is part of his religion, his religion
is that of a rapt Catholic, to whom the very heaven, with all that
therein be, is open and palpable; his is the Catholicism of profound
mysticism, and of the most universal temper.... It is perfectly safe to
affirm that if Mr THOMPSON write no other line, by this volume alone he
is as secure of remembrance as any poet of the century. His vocabulary
is very great.... Mr THOMPSON'S first volume is no mere promise--it is
itself among the great achievements of English poetry; it has reached
the peak of Parnassus at a bound.
He has actually accomplished the high thing in metaphysical poetry that
DONNE and CRASHAW only dreamed of. His mysticism is infinitely more
profound and significant than theirs, as his imagination is more
impulsive, ardent, and beautiful. He is the great Platonist of English
poetry. If Mr THOMPSON had never written anything after his first
volume, there would be but one Stuart poet with whom the author of _Her
Portrait_ could be compared for orchestral majesties of song, and that
one MILTON.... He is an argonaut of literature, far travelled in the
realms of gold, and he has in a strange degree the assimilative
mind.... We do not think we forget any of the splendid things of an
English anthology when we say that _The Hound of Heaven_ seems to us,
on the whole, the most wonderful lyric in the language. It fingers all
the stops of the spirit, and we hear now a thrilling and dolorous note
of doom, and now the quiring of the spheres, and now the very pipes of
Pan, but under all the still, sad music of humanity. It is the return
of the nineteenth century to THOMAS A KEMPIS.--J. L. GARVIN, in _The
Newcastle Chronicle_ and in _The Bookman_.
The fine frenzy, and the fine line: these are two root characteristics
of Mr THOMPSON'S really remarkable poem. One has seldom seen poet more
wildly abandoned to his rapture, more absorbed in the trance of his
ecstasy. When the irresistible moment comes, he throws himself upon his
mood as a glad swimmer gives himself to the waves, careless whither the
strong tide carries him, knowing only the wild joy of the laughing
waters and the rainbow spray. He shouts, as it were, for mere gladness,
in the welter of wonderful words, and he dives swift and fearless to
fetch his deep-sea fancies. When weak men venture on these vagaries
they drown; but Mr THOMPSON is a strong swimmer. Hyperboles, which in
other hands had seemed merely absurd, in his delight us as examples of
that "fine excess" which is one of the most enthralling of the many
enchantments of poetry.... Indeed, Mr THOMPSON must simply be CRASHAW
born again, but born greater. Though the conception, for example, of
_The Hound of Heaven_--the case of a sinner fleeing from the love of
Christ--is exactly in CRASHAW'S vein, yet it was not in his power to
have suggested such tremendous speed and terror of flight as whirls
through every line of Mr THOMPSON'S poem.--R. LE GALLIENNE, in _The
Daily Chronicle_.
A new poet--and this time a major and not a minor one. On the section
called _Love in Dian's Lap_, much might be said of its extraordinary
conception and workmanship. The section is one long, beautiful song of
praise, and even worship, of one whom the poet calls his "dear
administress." But surely never was woman worshipped with more utter
chastity of passion. Whether _Before her Portrait in Youth_, or
regarding her as _A poet breaking silence_, or only reflecting on her
wearing of a new dress, the Poet is so full of fine matter and so
adoring in his expression of it, as to bring DANTE himself to
mind.--_St. James's Gazette._
Here are dominion--domination over language, and a sincerity as of
Robert Burns.... The epithet sublime has been sadly stained and
distorted by comic writers, and there is a danger in applying it in its
honest light without warning. This safeguard established, we have to
say that in our opinion Mr THOMPSON'S poetry at its highest attains a
sublimity unsurpassed by any Victorian poet--a sublimity which will
stand the hideous test of extracts. In _Her Portrait_ a constant
interchange of symbol between earthly and heavenly beauty pulses like
day and night.--JOHN DAVIDSON, in _The Speaker_.
When at the end of 1893 there appeared a little quarto volume of poems
by FRANCIS THOMPSON, the English world of letters experienced an
agreeable shock of surprise. It was as if a rocket had been sent up
into a dark night. His poems have all the "pomp and prodigality" of
imagination for which Gray's frugal muse longed.--_The Spectator._
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. When he
chanted in his chapel of dreams, the airs were often airs which he had
learnt from CRASHAW and from 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 nowhere else; and people
listened to the music, entranced as by a new magic. The genius of
FRANCIS THOMPSON was Oriental, exuberant in colour, woven into
elaborate patterns, and went draped in old silk 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 dropt sentences by the way, cries of joy or pity, love
of children, worship of the Virgin and the 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.--ARTHUR SYMONS, in _The
Saturday Review_.
To read Mr FRANCIS THOMPSON'S _Poems_, then, is like setting sail with
DRAKE or HAWKINS in search of new worlds and golden spoils. He has the
magnificent Elizabethan manner, the splendour of conception, the
largeness of imagery.--KATHERINE TYNAN-HINKSON, in _The Bookman_.
As a matter of fact--such fact as one kisses the book to in a court of
law--it was in a railway carriage on my way back to London that I first
read Mr THOMPSON'S poem, _The Mistress of Vision_; but, in such truth
as would pass anywhere but in a court of law, it was at Cambridge, in
the height of the summer term and in a Fellows' Garden that the
revelation first came. I thought then in my enthusiasm that no such
poem had been written or attempted since COLERIDGE attempted, and left
off writing, _Kubla Khan_. In a cooler hour I think so yet; and, were
my age twenty-five or so, it would delight me to swear to it, riding to
any man's drawbridge who shuts his gates against it, and blowing the
horn of challenge. It is verily a wonderful poem; hung, like a fairy
tale, in middle air--a sleeping palace of beauty set in a glade in the
heart of the woods of Westermain, surprised there and recognized with a
gasp as satisfying, and summarizing a thousand youthful longings after
beauty. To me also my admiration seemed too hot to last; but four or
five years leave me unrepentant. It seemed to me to be more likely to
be a perishable joy, because I had once clutched at, and seemed to
grasp, similar beauties in POE. Mr THOMPSON'S thought, always strong,
often runs into phrases of exquisite sweetness and exquisite
clarity.... The lines beginning:
"Firm is the man, and set beyond the cast
Of fortune's game and the iniquitous hour,"
are worthy to be remembered beside DANIEL'S _Epistle to the Countess of
Cumberland_.--Sir A. QUILLER COUCH ("Q"), in _The Daily News_.
Thompson's poetry is a "wassail of orgiac imageries." He is a poet's
poet, like SHELLEY and BLAKE. In order to follow him as he soars from
image to image and symbol to symbol, you must have the rare wings of
imagination.... THOMPSON mixes his metaphors so wisely that they
illumine each other, strange light shooting out of their weltering
chaos, like the radiance of phosphorescent waves. He troubles you with
sudden pictures that flash out against the blackness. This gift of
dreadful vision is not found in CRASHAW or in PATMORE, in DONNE or in
HERBERT, and therefore it seems to me that THOMPSON is essentially more
akin to BLAKE, COLERIDGE and ROSSETTI than to the ecclesiastical
mystics. He is a twentieth-century mystic with a seventeenth-century
manner.--JAMES DOUGLAS, in _The Morning Leader_.
Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons; now, because they are
talking about something too large for anyone to understand, and now,
again, because they are talking about something too small for anyone to
see. FRANCIS THOMPSON possessed both these infinities.... He was
describing the evening earth with its mist and fume and fragrance, and
represented the whole as rolling upwards like a smoke; then suddenly
he called the whole ball of the earth a thurible, and said that some
gigantic spirit swung it slowly before God. This is the case of the
image too large for comprehension; another instance sticks in my mind
of the image which is too small. In one of his poems he says that the
abyss between the known and the unknown is bridged by "Pontifical
death." There are about ten historical and theological puns in that one
word. That a priest means a pontiff, that a pontiff means a
bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that death may turn out
after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least priest and bridges
both attest to the fact that one thing can get separated from another
thing--these ideas, and twenty more, are all tacitly concentrated in
the word "Pontifical." In FRANCIS THOMPSON'S poetry, as in the poetry
of the universe, you can work infinitely out and out, but yet
infinitely in and in. These two infinities are the mark of greatness;
and he was a great poet.--G. K. CHESTERTON, in _The Illustrated London
News_.
Thompson used his large vocabulary with a boldness--and especially a
recklessness, almost a frivolity in rhyme--that were worthy of
BROWNING. On the other hand, these rugged points were, at a further
view, absorbed into the total effect of beauty in a manner which
BROWNING never achieved; for the poet, entirely free from timidity in
matters of poetic form, relied not on chastity or perfection of detail,
but on the perfervid rush of his genius, which simply carried his
readers over the rough places. Here was a large utterance--large in
bulk, in speed, in a lavish disregard of economy, and yet, what could
not for a moment be mistaken was that the poetry was at once great and
sincere. These _Sister Songs_, written in praise of two little sisters,
contain a number of lovely and most musical lines, and some
passages--such as the seventh section of the first poem--which SPENSER
would not have disowned.--_The Times._
The greater a poet's message, the more profound his thought, the larger
his range, and the more exquisite his note, the deeper and more
incessant will be his demand upon his reader. That is why the great
poets have had to wait for their recognition. Only the few will or can
co-operate at the beginning, but they are the leaven; and now whole
masses can see the poetic purport of SHELLEY, COLERIDGE, KEATS and
WORDSWORTH, of whom the contemporary criticism was a thing over which
you laugh or cry, as the mood has you. Those who see in Mr FRANCIS
THOMPSON an authentic poet have at any rate the profound interest of
watching the various stages in the making of their immortal. How have
the portents followed the precedent afforded by the poets just named?
In general, very accurately, we think. The common attitude of critics
towards them and him has been very similar--in the case of SHELLEY it
is so near in its very wording as to be sometimes startling.
Extravagances and novelties of diction, a toppling over of images, and
"obscurity"--of course that--were dwelt upon by objectors--very just
objectors, no doubt--who busied and troubled about details, lost all
sense of proportion, and had no ear for the great and ultimate meaning
of the poet's message.... The note that comes most majestically from Mr
THOMPSON is that of the reconciliation of the two natures and destinies
of man. To that literal oneness WORDSWORTH groped in his merely
"kindred points of heaven and home." Of that oneness ROSSETTI has the
hint, and COVENTRY PATMORE the full vision. Mr THOMPSON is the heir of
the poets, and he has entered fully into his inheritance. He has not
picked their flowers and worn them fading; their seed has passed into
his life, and they have blossomed anew.--_The Academy._
No other among the younger poets so effectually proclaimed a mastery of
the grand style: none other had so securely occupied a position on the
right side of the line which for ever separates inspiration from
talent, poetry from agreeable verse. He appeared on the scene fully
equipped. There were no long years of public neglect, or production of
volumes which lay unnoticed on the bookstalls before being cast into
the dust heap. The marvellous splendour of his first volume revealed a
writer of no common order; with a secureness of touch, a magical
decoration of style, and a real message behind all the pomp and glitter
and dazzling display. It was art not for art's sake, but charged with a
meaning and a name. _The Hound of Heaven_ was hailed by all competent
critics as one of the great religious poems of this time or of any
time.--_The Daily News._
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