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Francis Thompson: A boy and his dog.

The breaths of kissing night and day
+++Were mingled in the Eastern heaven.
Throbbing with unheard melody
+++Shook Lyra all its star-chord seven.
++++++When dusk shrunk cold and light trod shy
+++++++++And dawn’s grey eyes were troubled grey
++++++And souls went palely up the sky
+++++++++And mine to Lucidé.

There was no change in her sweet eyes
+++Since last I saw those sweet eyes shine:
There was no change in her deep heart
+++Since last that deep heart knocked at mine.
++++++Her eyes were clear: her eyes were Hope’s,
+++++++++Wherein did ever come and go
++++++The sparkle of the fountain-drops
+++++++++From her sweet soul below.

The chambers in the house of dreams
+++Are fed with so divine an air
That Time’s hoar wings grow young therein
+++And they who walk there are most fair.
++++++I joyed for me, I joyed for her,
+++++++++Who with the Past meet girt about,
++++++Where our last kiss still warms the air
+++++++++Nor can her eyes go out.

Insubstantial as the shadow of a dream, this was the poetry for poets, its exquisiteness something not to be defined. Reading it again, one is struck by a resemblance to a third poet, Coleridge. This is poetry warmer than Shelley’s, which is sometimes a little cold, as though the clouds it flew among were of frore drops. Here is the very air of

A damsel with a dulcimer
+++Singing of Mount Abora.

FRANCIS THOMPSON WAS ONE of the many poets who have been utterly impossible for the practical purposes of life. The son of a prosperous medical man, the nephew of an Oxford man who was of the company of John Henry Newman, the comforts and the prosperities and happinesses of life were not for him. He had sunk to the depths of poverty when “Dream-Tryst,” written in pencil on a dingy bit of paper, was the means of his discovery and rescue. But one hesitates to name him with the long line of examples that might be quoted from Marlowe to Verlaine, because, while he grasped at his euthanasia as did Coleridge and Edgar Allan Poe and James Clarence Mangan, the grosser vices never touched him. He had indeed a singular innocence of nature. He may have put his soul to sleep, but she remained unsmirched. Indeed, his poetry could never have been written by one who had gross experiences and gross memories: its flight is unclogged.

Mr. Wilfred Meynell, who befriended him, who admired him, loved him, bore with him as few would, and has now written an illuminating introduction to the Selected Poems, never let him go after that emergence from the depths with “Dream-Tryst.” He had never again to endure starvation, excessive cold, squalid misery. For the remainder of his life he was indefatigably cared for by this devoted friend.

He came about the time the little Renaissance of poetry of the ‘nineties was beginning. The swing of the pendulum was towards poetry—it has swung backwards now with a vengeance; and there was not only a publisher for poetry but a public, so that a great many little poets, robins and wrens and linnets, were emboldened to come out and sing in the unusual sunshine. The poets took full advantage of the happy moment. They chattered a good deal about themselves and their doings. They were treated with respect in the critical journals. Their names were so often in the newspapers that they may have reached even the man in the street. If they puffed and preened themselves a little vaingloriously, the Bodley Head spelt immortality for them, who shall blame them? The winter of the next decade was coming fast enough.

The little movement of the ‘nineties produced, or at least gave a hearing to many genuine poets, though some were of small compass. It gave the minor poet his or her chance. If they were called nightingales, and blackbirds, and thrushes when they were only the smaller singers, well, the critic is not infallible. No one wants the minor poet in this first decade of the twentieth century; and the critics are engaged in discovering for themselves a major poet who shall be only a daw dressed in peacock’s feathers, for there is no sign of a major poet on the horizon; and one grieves over the silence of some few exquisite minor poets to whom the ‘nineties did honour.

Poetry is a seed which perishes on arid soil: it is only the immortal and the very young who can go on writing poetry which no one reads. So to-day the minor poets are silent; and the two whose greatness we had the wit and the generosity to recognise in the ‘nineties were till lately the two who came to one’s mind when one thought of what great poetry was being written in our days, or at least what essential poetry. They were Francis Thompson, whose poetry is nothing if not great, and W. B. Yeats, whose poetry is nothing if not essential. Francis Thompson has always the authentic air of the immortal. Even his failures are great. His aim was always as high as the stars. His faults are the faults of greatness.

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