The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson

Hound metaphor

The title reverses the usual hunting metaphor—God is the pursuer, the speaker is prey. Thompson borrowed this from Psalm 139: 'Whither shall I flee from thy presence?'

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 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,

Oxymoron chain

Three contradictions in a row: chase that doesn't hurry, speed that's deliberate, urgency that's majestic. God's pursuit operates outside normal time.

They beat—and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet—

The refrain's logic

Each refrain voice changes slightly. First: 'betray.' Second: 'shelter.' Third: 'contents.' God names what the speaker is actually doing.

"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."

I pleaded, outlaw-wise,

By many a hearted casement, curtained red,

Trellised with intertwining charities;

(For, though I knew His love Who followéd,

Yet was I sore adread

Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside)

Fear of exclusivity

The parenthetical reveals the core anxiety—not that God doesn't love him, but that God's love might exclude everything else. This is the psychological crux.

But, if one little casement parted wide,

The gust of His approach would clash it to.

Archaic 'wist'

'Wist' is old past tense of 'wit' (to know). Fear didn't know how to escape as well as Love knew how to pursue. The archaic diction makes this feel biblical.

Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.

Across the margent of the world I fled,

Cosmic geography

'Margent' is margin or edge. He's fleeing to the literal boundaries of creation, trying to hide at the cosmos's outer limits.

And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,

Smiting for shelter on their changed bars;

Fretted to dulcet jars

And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.

I said to dawn: Be sudden—to eve: Be soon;

With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over

From this tremendous Lover!

Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!

I tempted all His servitors, but to find

My own betrayal in their constancy,

In faith to Him their fickleness to me,

Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.

To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;

Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.

But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,

The long savannahs of the blue;

Or whether, Thunder-driven,

They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven,

Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet:—

Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.

Still with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbed pace,

Oxymoron chain

Three contradictions in a row: chase that doesn't hurry, speed that's deliberate, urgency that's majestic. God's pursuit operates outside normal time.

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

Came on the following Feet,

And a Voice above their beat—

"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

I sought no more that, after which I strayed,

In face of man or maid;

But still within the little children's eyes.

Seems something, something that replies,

They at least are for me, surely for me!

I turned me to them very wistfully;

But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair

With dawning answers there,

Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.

Guardian angels

Victorian belief: children have guardian angels until age seven. The angels literally prevent his connection to innocence.

"Come then, ye other children, Nature's—share

With me" (said I) "your delicate fellowship;

Let me greet you lip to lip,

Let me twine with you caresses,

Wantoning

With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses,

Banqueting

With her in her wind-walled palace,

Underneath her azured daïs,

Quaffing, as your taintless way is,

From a chalice

Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring."

So it was done:

I in their delicate fellowship was one—

Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.

I knew all the swift importings

On the wilful face of skies;

I knew how the clouds arise

Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings;

All that's born or dies

Rose and drooped with—made them shapers

Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine—

With them joyed and was bereaven.

I was heavy with the even,

When she lit her glimmering tapers

Round the day's dead sanctities.

I laughed in the morning's eyes.

I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,

Heaven and I wept together,

And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;

Against the red throb of its sunset-heart

I laid my own to beat,

And share commingling heat;

But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.

In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.

For ah we know not what each other says,

These things and I; in sound I speak—

Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.

Nature as stepmother

Not 'Mother Nature'—stepdame (stepmother). Nature is a substitute parent who can't actually nourish him. This contradicts Romantic nature-worship.

Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;

Let her, if she would owe me,

Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me

The breasts o' her tenderness:

Never did any milk of hers once bless

Nursing metaphor

He wants Nature to literally nurse him like a mother. The erotic-maternal imagery is deliberate—he's seeking sustenance from the wrong source.

My thirsting mouth.

Nigh and nigh draws the chase,

With unperturbed pace

Deliberate speed majestic instancy

And past those noisèd Feet

A voice comes yet more fleet—

"Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me.'

Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!

My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,

And smitten me to my knee;

I am defenceless utterly.

I slept, methinks, and woke,

And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.

In the rash lustihead of my young powers,

I shook the pillaring hours.

And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,

I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years—

My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,

Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.

Yea, faileth now even dream

The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;

Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist

I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,

Are yielding; cords of all too weak account.

For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.

Ah! is Thy love indeed

Amaranth flower

Amaranth is the mythical unfading flower, symbol of immortality. He's asking: does God's eternal love crowd out all temporary earthly loves?

A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,

Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?

Ah! must—

Designer infinite!—

Ah must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?

Artist's question

'Limn' means to draw or paint. Thompson, who destroyed much of his early poetry, asks if God must burn him out before using him as an instrument.

My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;

And now my heart is as a broken fount,

Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever

From the dank thoughts that shiver

Upon the sighful branches of my mind.

Such is what is to be?

The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?

I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;

Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds

From the hid battlements of Eternity,

Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then

Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again;

But not ere him who summoneth

I first have seen, enwound

Death figure

Purple robes and cypress crown—this is Death personified. The trumpet from Eternity announces mortality, not just abstract time.

With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;

His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.

Whether man's heart or life it be which yields

Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields

Be dunged with rotten death?

Now of that long pursuit

Comes on at hand the bruit;

That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:

"And is thy earth so marred,

Shattered in shard on shard?

Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!

"Strange, piteous, futile thing!

Wherefore should any set thee love apart?

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

God's self-description

God claims to make 'much of naught'—creation ex nihilo, something from nothing. The speaker is nothing; only divine love makes him something.

"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."

Halts by me that footfall:

Is my gloom, after all,

The reversal

The poem's final revelation: the darkness he feared was actually God's shadow—the hand reaching toward him, not striking him.

Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."