Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents

FRANCIS THOMPSON

Poems 1894

Francis Thompson (1859-1907) was rescued from opium and destitution by Wilfred Meynell, who published his first poems and helped him back to health. He was a Catholic, conscious of writing in a tradition that included Richard Crashaw and Coventry Patmore, and interested like Crashaw in verbal experiment and extravagance. In his aestheticism he belongs to the 1890s, but there is a genuine ascetic and religious feeling that marks him off from his contemporaries.

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I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyinthine 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 chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbéd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat - and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet -
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’

(from ‘The Hound of Heaven’, page 48)

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Poetry of the 1890s