Great Minor Poet

FRANCIS THOMPSON: IN HIS PATHS--Terence L. Connolly--Bruce ($2.75).

"Strange, piteous, futile thing!

Wherefore should any set thee love apart?

Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He said),

"And human love needs human meriting:

How hast thou merited--"Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest

clot?

Alack, thou knowest not How little worthy of any love thou art?

Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble

thee

Save Me, save only Me? All which I took from thee I did but

take,

Not for thy harms, But just that thou might'st seek it in

My arms.

All which thy child's mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at

home:

Rise, clasp My hand, and come!"

Coventry Patmore called The Hound of Heaven "one of the very few 'great' odes the language can boast." When its author was described as the greatest poet of Catholicism since Dante, Critic Miriam Allen de Ford objected that he was more than that, just as Dante was more than a Catholic poet. In her opinion, Francis Thompson was the greatest minor poet who ever wrote in English.

Thompson appeared in London in 1885. He had failed as a student, as a book agent, as a shoemaker's apprentice, as a soldier. He was 29, and looked 50. He wore no shirt, keeping his coat collar turned up and pinned together. His haggard face had the detached, wavering expression of the confirmed drug addict. He had been taking opium for years.

Sometimes he slept in the crypt of the Church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, sometimes on a park bench on the nearby Victoria Embankment. He kept alive by running errands, selling matches, holding horses' heads. In this darkest England, Thompson had two possessions--a copy of Blake's poems and a copy of Aeschylus--and one friend: a streetwalker who gave him food and sometimes shared her room with him.

Drugs and Death. Born into a devout family of Roman Catholic converts, the son of a doctor, Thompson studied at severe, plain Ushaw College (where Lafcadio Hearn went to school), was shy, popular, studious, commonly called Tommy. When he was 17, this mystically devout poet was told that he was unqualified for the priesthood (dreaminess and physical weakness were two reasons). His agitated family sent him to grim Owens College in sooty Manchester, where for six years he studied medicine intermittently, was given opium while ill and developed a craving for the drug. Suddenly he gave up his studies, quarreled with his father, fled to London.

For three years Thompson was desttute. One spring day in 1888 he mailed a sheaf of his poems (written in an account book) to Merry England, monthly Roman Catholic literary magazine edited by Poet Wilfred Meynell. Thereafter Thompson haunted Charing Cross post office waiting for a reply. The poems were left on a shelf in the editorial office, unopened, for a month. By the time Editor Meynell read them, Thompson had given up hope. He began to see visions in the London streets. decided to kill himself. He had taken half of a lethal dose of laudanum when he had another vision--of Thomas Chatterton. the 18th-Century poet who committed suicide at 18. He put the poison aside.

Soon afterward he found one of his poems in Merry England.

The Awful Condition. Thereafter, until his death in 1907, Wilfred Meynell and his poetess-wife Alice took care of Francis Thompson. They sent him to a hospital, then to the monastery at Storrington in Sussex--a country of Roman roads, rolling fields, abandoned chalk mines, rooks and sheep. Later, at the Franciscan monastery at Pantasaph in Wales, where he spent three years Thompson was forbidden money, even for postage stamps, lest he spend it for drugs He walked through the hills, wrapped in an ulster that extended from his neck to his ankles--"gentle, humble and good anc very conscious of his powers, but neve vain or proud." He never entirely cure himself of the drug habit, developed tuberculosis, wrote almost no poetry in his last ten years, weighed only 70 Ibs. when he died. Beyond the knowledge of most men, says Author Connolly, Thompson "knew the meaning of the awful condition set down by our Saviour for those who would be His disciples: If any man come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me."

This book by Father Terence Connolly, chairman of the Department of English at Boston College, is not a conventional biography of Thompson. It is a simple, straightforward record of Father Connolly's pilgrimage to the places in England where Thompson lived and suffered. Its chief merit is its warm picture of English Catholic life, beginning with a superb portrait of Wilfred Meynell (now 92) at home among his Thompson mementos.

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