In what must be one of the most moving essays in English literature, “Shelley,” Francis Thompson identifies himself not only as an arch-admirer of Shelley, but as a practitioner of a stylistic creed which, though he attributes its highest virtues to his idol, might easily be identified as one of the major characteristics of his own poetry. He says that “for astounding figurative opulence” Shelley yields only to Shakespeare. For one acquainted with Thompson’s own body of work it might be argued without too much exaggeration that, in this department, he himself yields to few poets.

It is often the case when one poet analyzes the work of another poet, he simply projects his own practice into his analysis and comes forth revealing more about his own poems than his subject’s. Of course, at the same time, it must be remembered that no poet could possibly write about another poet in the way Thompson has about Shelly without feeling a deep aesthetic kinship with that poet. In other words, Thompson is telling us penetrating truths about Shelley’s poems while at the same time, perhaps unconsciously, laying bare his own poetic heart.

Since there has been, during the past several decades, an abundance of critical emphasis on the function and importance of imagery in poetry, Thompson’s relevance to our times deserves more attention than it is currently receiving. His dwelling upon this element in Shelley’s work, with the connective references to the Metaphysical School and Crashaw, serves as a perfect introduction to his own poems, which are uniquely rich in their pictorial effects. “It would have been as conscious an effort for him to speak without figure as it is for most men to speak with figure,” he writes of Shelley, and though one might hesitate to take sides against Mr. Eliot’s (T.S. Eliot) well-known admiration of the Metaphysicals, and especially John Donne, by echoing Thompson’s unsparing condemnation of them as manifesting nothing more serious than “intellectual ingenuity” in their manner of toying with imagery, we cannot but agree that his distaste for their “heartless gallantry” gives a degree of righteousness to his indignation. Unlike this type of poet for whom he found it impossible to respond, he, in company with Shelley, was incapable of cutting his visions into shapes with a pair of scissors, but instead recast his inclination toward a spontaneity that could recreate the realities perceived by his senses. This practice set the primary pitch of nearly all his work.

Consequently this fact about the poems of Francis Thompson is most apparent in the originality of the visual thread that runs through them. Greatness in a poet can often be measured most convincingly in terms of the “shock of recognition” one receives from his small incisive images which have a ring of truth in them that cannot be accurately paraphrased in the prosaic everyday language of human intercourse.

Thompson’s ingenious use of imagery gives him an especially high rank as a poet’s poet. And yet it is not such skills or the cleverness with which he applies them that distinguishes his work, but rather the rapturous vehemence of his involvement in nearly every situation which he sought to turn into poetry. His immortality is securely founded upon his best moments, which are frequent enough to allow us to label his poetry as a major contribution to English letters.

A poet should be known only by his flashes of true genius, and consequently a better knowledge of Thompson in this respect would do much towards reviving his deflated reputation. Blake once said, “All sublimity is founded upon minute discrimination.” That Thompson’s work can prove doubly rewarding to the careful reader who scrutinizes it closely is needless to point out. The poems themselves provide a far more impressive counter against the potential skeptic than any word that can be written in their favor.

Some of Thompson’s most charming poems were written about the Meynell children whom he came to love with a strange and yet endearing depth. There was Daisy, whose “…beauty smoothed earth’s furrowed face” and whose gifts to the poet made his “wild, wild heart/Fly down to her little hand.” They walked together on a day in which “The sea’s eye had a mist on it.” There were few joys more elevating to the poet’s spirit than walking across open, flower-sprinkled fields in the company of a young child. He dedicated one of his major achievements to Monica, who happened to be accompanying him on the day he spotted a poppy amidst a growth of grass:

Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare,
And left the flush print in a poppy there:
Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came,
And the flaming wind puffed it to a flapping flame.

With burnt mouth, red like a lion’s, it drank
The blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank,
And dipped its cup in the purpurate shine
When the cistern conduits ran with wine.

Explication could add nothing to these lines, only perhaps lessen their effect by diverting our attention from them. On they walked, poet and child, hand in hand until “She turned…/And saw the sleeping gipsy there; /And snatched and snapped it in swift child’s whim…” Already “…with bruised poppies my feet are red!” he tells us as he looks down at the small girl musing on her lack of knowledge of “The diverse chambers in love’s guest-hall…” He calls the poppy which her innocent hand has severed from the soil and given to him, “…this withering flower of dreams.” For a moment he envisions it in a field of wheat:

The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head,
Heavy with dreams as that with bread:…

Olivia he compares to a “White flake of childhood, clinging so/To my soiled raiment…” It is she whose arrows he fears because they are “still unbarbed with destined fire…”

In “Sister Songs” he says,

From its red leash my heart strains tamelessly,
For spring leaps in the womb of the young year!

and

Yet the season all the boughs
Has kindled to the finger-tips,—

and

……..…that rose Christ, who from the earth
Suck’st our poor prayers…

While daylight draws to a close

…… Ere eve has struck and furled
The beamy-textured tent…

Thompson never seems to tire of describing spring:

The leaves dance in the breath of Spring.

and “showers of sunny beams/were splashed from the earth in drops of light.” On he takes us until we reach “the hedgerow track,” where

…..The long broad grasses underneath
Are warted with rain like a toad’s knobbed back…

We watch as

…..The smoldering rosebud chars through its sheath
The lily stirs her snowy limbs,
…..…..Ere she swims
Naked up through her cloven green…

His wondering takes him into a woods where a “goodly melody’, first faint, then bursting suddenly forth with the force of a crescendo fills him with delight.

‘Twas like no earthly instrument…

Drawn from a pipe, or reed, or string…

So heavenly flutes made murmurous plain
To heavenly viols, that again
—Aching with music—wailed back pain…

Thus we have the imagery of a full orchestra creating such music as no human orchestra could equal. It must be remembered that the time is spring and that amidst the music of unfolding flora the poet has paused to eye and identify each flower as it appears:

…..…..And all with an unsought accord
…..….. Sang together from the sward…

Later in the same poem he refers to the flowers as “elfin swarms…”

Never did Thompson’s own dark past, “that nightmare time,” lie far behind even his brightest thoughts:

Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
……….In night’s slow-wheeled car…

Need we inquire any further into the difficulties confronting the poet at the time which these lines refer to? They speak in their conciseness with an almost unendurable pain. Telling of his rescue from the streets of London he recalls the reawakening of his vision which he feared had been lost forever:

…rooks in spreading gyres like broken smoke
Wheel…

His recovery coincided with the advent of spring:

…rushest down in every stream
Whose passion frets my spirit’s deepening gorge;
Unhood’st mine eyes-heart, and fliest my dream:
…swing’st the hammers of my forge;
As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the laboring surges of the world.

Striking a humble note, he reminds the spring that his poem,

This fragile song, is but a curled
…..Shell outgathered from the sea
And murmurous still of its nativity.

He calls this same spring for which he feels such sublime attachment a

Cunning pit for gazers’ senses…

Yet it is the supreme manifestation of youth and thus comparable to the Meynell sisters

…whose young sex is yet but in thy soul;—
….. As hoarded in the vine
Hang the gold skins of undelirious wine…

And how much science is contained in

The splendent sun no splendour can display
Till on gross things he dash his broken ray,
From cloud and tree and flower re-tossed in prismy spray.

He likens the innocence of spring and the joy, of which it is itself unconscious, with which it inspires poets to

……...…a lesson taught we know not how,
……. And what it is that from us flows
The bearer better than the utterer knows.

Are there many poets today capable of such a courageous confession? But perhaps it only applies to Dionysian poets like Thompson.

He continues to dwell upon the uncertainty of poetic inspiration, how “the hardest pang whereon” the poet “lay his mutinous head may be a Jacob’s stone.” But all is not entirely unpredictable, for the stage on which the poem will perform assumes a setting of its own making which to a perceptive observer might well indicate that something like a poem is about to happen:

…….……the air is rumorous of fray
. Before the first shafts of the sun’s onslaught
…. From gloom’s black harness…

Suggestions that would be meaningless, in fact, hardly noticeable to most people are the following:

The murmurous gnats whose aimless hovering
……. Reveal song’s summer in the air;
The outstretched hand, which cannot thought declare,
……….Yet is thought’s harbinger.

launches the poet’s imagination on a magic carpet to a land of fantastic discoveries:

…….. Not vainly has she wrought
Not vainly from the cloudward-jetting turret
Of her aerial mind for thy weak feet
Let down the silken ladder of her thought.

Written for the two Meynell sisters, “Sister Songs” suddenly begins to veer in a more personal direction. The poet addresses both girls as if they were one person, “little tender maiden.” He advises her to preserve the innocent freshness of her vision at all costs, and promises to do his part towards this end:

I will not feed my unpastured heart
On thee, green pleasaunce as thou art,

and this promise, he says, holds good even for that time when “With age in all thy veins, while all thy heart was youth.”

How

The flying fringes of the sun’s cloak frush
The fragile leaves which on these warm lips blush;

and “since my love drags this poor shadow, me” after it, the love which the poet feels for the tender maiden, he will be all the more cautious about keeping his distance from her and confine his exultations to dreams.

But soon “The day is lingered out” and “The long laburnum drips/Its honey of wild flame.” The poet is satisfied that he has established a permanent relationship between himself and the Meynell daughters, for

With this thread from out the tomb my dead hand shall tether thee!

NOTE: Francis Thompson (1859-1907) was born in Lancashire, England into a family that had converted to Roman Catholicism. Although a deep feeling for his religion was a keynote to his entire life, he was rejected as a candidate for the priesthood. In an attempt to follow in the footsteps of his father’s profession as a doctor, he failed miserably in his medical studies in Manchester. And even when he attempted to join the Army he was ungraciously turned down as incompetent. With nothing in life really going for him, he drifted to London becoming a resident tramp on the Thames embankment, acquiring an addiction for opium. After a prostitute took pity on him and helped him ward off complete dereliction, he began writing poems and sent one of them, “Dream Tryst” on “blue sugar wrapping paper” to Francis Meynell, the editor of a magazine along with his poet-wife Alice Meynell. The Meynells detected his talent immediately and thus set in motion the recovery of the fallen poet. His work began to appear in print in the 1890s and with the publication of his ode, “The Hound of Heaven”, he received instant recognition as a poet to be reckoned with.