To some of us they are "one-poem" poets. We know only Goldsmith's Deserted Villageand Gray's Elegy- though, of course, both wrote other fine works. Similarly, very few people can recall anything by Francis Thompson except The Hound of Heaven. Yet, even if he hadn't written another single verse, he would still be honoured for giving us one of the greatest of all religious poems. Can any reader ever forget its splendid opening lines?
I fled him down the nights and
down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of
the years;
I fled Him down the
labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the
midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under
running laughter.
In 1857 Dr Charles Thompson, 34, a Manchester surgeon, married Mary Morton, 35, a governess. Both were converts to Catholicism. Most of Charles's brothers also became Catholics; one, Edward, who had been an Anglican clergyman, later lectured at Dublin's Catholic University and edited the Dublin Review.
After their marriage the Thompsons moved to Preston, where Charles started a medical practice. Three of their five children survived infancy - two girls and Francis, who was born in 1859. He and his sisters received their primary education at home from private tutors and never mixed with other children. So, from his earliest years Francis became a "great reader" and "devoured" Shakespeare.
When nearly 12 he was sent to study for the priesthood at Ushaw Catholic seminary. He got "very good" marks at Latin, Greek and English, but at 18 he was found unsuitable for the priesthood, due to his "nervous timidity and natural indolence". He returned home - "a failure in his own eyes and a disappointment to his parents", says his biographer, J.C. Reid. His father then sent him to study medicine in Manchester, but seven years later, after wasting his time and failing his final exams three times, he was forced to get a job.
He hawked encyclopaedias for two months, not selling but reading them. Next he tried to join the army, but after some basic training he was rejected as physically unfit. Finally, after a row with his father, who suspected him of drinking, he left home and went off to London.
It was drugs, not drink, that were his downfall. While a medical student he became addicted to opium and laudanum, both then cheaper than beer or spirits. To what extent they affected his writings, as well as those of Poe, de Quincey, Coleridge and others, is still debated.
"I made the journey to the capital," he later wrote, "with the gloomiest forebodings." Then aged 26, at first he got various odd jobs in the streets - polishing shoes, holding horses, selling newspapers. Often he hadn't the price of a bed in a doss-house and slept rough.
He now "sank from shabbiness to rags, from poverty to beggary, from unkemptness to dirt and was nourished on scraps from vegetable-wagons", writes Reid. He had reached rock-bottom when someone persuaded him to submit some poems to Merry England, a Catholic magazine edited by Wilfrid Meynell, husband of Alice, both convert Catholic poets. The Meynells rescued him and became his best friends. They bought him new clothes, housed him and introduced him to some of their friends, such as Coventry Patmore.
They also sent him to the White Canons' house at Storrington in Sussex, where he stayed a year. It was there he wrote his masterpiece, The Hound of Heaven, describing God's pursuit of the human soul and the creature's flight from its creator. "The magnificence of its diction and the daring of its conception," wrote the critic Fr Claude Williamson OSC, in his study of Thompson, "place it on a plane by itself. It must be ranked as one of the treasures of English literature."
The Meynells also arranged for Thompson to go, in 1892, to the Capuchin friary at Pantasaph in north Wales, where he spent six years. There he became a close friend of Irish-born Fr Anselm Kenealy, who later became Archbishop of Simla in India. In his Memories of Thompsonhe wrote: "He was simple, humble, sincere and courteous. Not much of a man to look at, he was slightly under middle height with a straggly moustache and beard and a pair of splendid melancholy eyes. He spoke with a broad Lancashire accent."
But London, his nemesis, called him irresistibly and he spent most of his last years back there. Wilfrid Meynell got him literary hack work - book reviews and critical essays, as well as pedestrian lives of a couple of saints. He continued writing poetry, though none of it up to the standard of the Hound. Among his best later poems are Sister Songs, written for the Meynells' girls, and Ode to the Setting Sun.
He spent his last months in 1907 in the Sussex country home of another friend, the Catholic diplomat and poet, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who was once jailed for supporting Irish independence. While there the tuberculosis from which he long suffered, and for which he took opium, worsened and he was brought to hospital in London. Twelve days later, weighing only five stone, he died - on November 13th, 1907, 100 years ago last Tuesday. His tomb in Kensal Green bears the epitaph, "Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven."
He wrote one excellent poem, but he wasn't a great poet. "But if a man has written one fine poem," said Fr Williamson, "it is best to forget that he has written five hundred failures. Thompson was not a poet of the first order." He himself once said: "I would like to be called the poet of the return to God."