Selected Poems of Francis Thompson

Selected Poems of Francis Thompson With a Biographical Note by Wilfrid Meynell LONDON

The Twenty-fifth Thousand


Francis Thompson, a poet of high thinking, of celestial vision, and of imaginings that found literary images of answering splendour, died in London in the winter of 1907. His life—always a fragile one—doubtless owed its prolongation to man's unconquerable mind, in him so invincible through all vicissitude that he seemed to add a new significance to Wordsworth's phrase. To his mortal frame was denied the vitality that informs his verse. Howbeit, his verse was himself; he lived every line of it, fulfilling to the last letter his own description of the poet, piteous yet proud:
He lives detachèd days; He serveth not for praise; For gold He is not sold.
He asketh not world's eyes; Nor to world's ears he cries— Saith, These Shut, if ye please!
To this aloof moth of a man science was nearly as absorbing an interest as was the mysticism that some thought had eaten him up; and, to give a light example of his actuality, he who had scarce handled a bat since he left Ushaw College, knew every famous score of the last quarter of a century, and left among his papers cricket-verses, trivial yet tragic. One such verse acquaints us incidentally with his Lancashire lineage: