“And the sun comes with power amid the clouds of heaven,
Before his way
Went forth the trumpet of the March
Before his way, before his way,
Dances the pennon of the May! 
O Earth, unchilded, widowed Earth, so long
Lifting in patient pine and ivy-tree
Mournful belief and steadfast prophecy,
Behold how all things are made true! 
Behold your bridegroom cometh in to you
Exceeding glad and strong!”

The great song takes us back to the days of Mithra and the sol invictus of Aurelian.  That outburst of sunshine in the evening of the Roman Empire, rekindling the fires of Apollo’s ancient altars for men who loved the sunshine and felt the wonder of it, is repeated with almost added glory in Thompson’s marvellous poems.

Yet for Francis Thompson all this glory of the sun is but a symbol.  The world where his spirit dwells is beyond the sun, and in nature it displays itself to man but brokenly.  In the bloody fires of sunset, in the exquisite white artistry of the snow-flake, this supernatural world is but showing us a few of its miracles, by which the miracles of Christian faith are daily and hourly matched for sheer wonder and beauty.  The idealist claims as his inheritance all those things in which the pagan finds his gods, and views them as the revelations of the Master Spirit.

It is difficult to write about Thompson’s poetry without writing mainly about himself.  In The Hound of Heaven, as in much else that he has written, there is abundance of his own experience, and indeed his poems often remind us of the sorrows of Teufelsdroeckh.  That, however, is not the purpose of this lecture; and, beyond a few notes of a general kind, we shall leave him to reveal himself.  Except for Mr. Meynell’s illuminative and all too short introduction to his volume of Thompson’s Selected Poems, there are as yet only scattered articles in magazines to tell his strange and most pathetic story.  His writings are few, comprising three short books of poetry, his prose Essay on Shelley, and a Life of St. Ignatius, which is full of interest and almost overloaded with information, but which may be discounted from the list of his permanent contributions to literature or to thought.  Yet that small output is enough to establish him among the supreme poets of our land.

Apart from its poetic power and spiritual vision, his was an acute and vivid mind.  On things political and social he could express himself in little casual flashes whose shrewd and trenchant incisiveness challenge comparison with Mr. Chesterton’s own asides.  His acquaintance with science seems to have been extensive, and at times he surprises us with allusions and metaphors of an unusually technical kind, which he somehow renders intelligible even to the non-scientific reader.  These are doubly illuminative, casting spiritual light on the material world, and strengthening with material fact the tenuous thoughts of the spiritual.  The words which he used of Shelley are, in this respect, applicable to himself.  “To Shelley’s ethereal vision the most rarefied mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand of outward things.”