Here the "curse of destinate verse" reads like a blessing. Yet, strictly speaking, he found that unwritten predestinate verse means an ill case:—
For ever the songs I sing are sad
With the songs I never sing.
His complaint is not against the verse that gets written, which even when sad of origin is a boon: "Deep grief or pain, may, and has in my case, found immediate outlet in poetry."
To his view of others on previous pages must be added his attitude towards the author of "The Anthem of Earth," of "The Hound of Heaven," of "Shelley." One who went to the task of reviewing his contemporaries heavy, not with distaste, but with pent-up potential admirations, who had an appetite at once insatiable and fastidious for all literature, must needs have enjoyed in relaxation the splendours of his own verse.[60] But not merely as critic did Francis Thompson realise the greatness of Thompson. The innermost chambers of his consciousness buzzed with the certainty of his poetic gravity and significance. He trusted the quality of the poetry within him as an ordinary man trusts the beat of his pulse and counts upon it. There were anxieties of composition and, of course, the ebb and flow of satisfaction in himself and a final despair. But before that he had known that he was, and he still knew that he had been, a poet. That is why he is so often the laureate of his own verse—
Before mine own elect stood I,
And said to Death:—'Not these shall die.'
I issued mandate royally.
I bade Decay:—'Avoid and fly;
For I am fatal unto thee.'
I sprinkled a few drops of verse,
And said to Ruin, 'Quit thy hearse':
To my loved, 'Pale not, come with me;
I will escort thee down the years,
With me thou walk'st immortally.'
These vaunting rhymes were written that he might go on to declare his undoing, being now stripped of his songs. It was true, of course, that he lost, not the poetry, but the functions of the poet. In exquisite lines he begs his muses to stay their flight, and his exquisite lines belie the convention that they have flown, that the shrines of his heart are empty.
In Mr. Wilfred Whitten's obituary notice of Thompson there is report at first hand of the poet's satisfaction in that his poetry was immortal. He quotes:—
The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head,
Heavy with dreams, as that with bread;
The goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeper
The reaper reaps, and Time the reaper.
I hang 'mid men my needless head,
And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:
The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper
Time shall reap, but after the reaper
The world shall gleam of me, me the sleeper!
And he adds: "When Francis Thompson wrote these verses, he did not indulge a fitful or exalted hope; he expressed the quiet faith of his post-poetic years. Thompson knew that above the grey London tumult, in which he fared so ill, he had hung a golden bell whose tones would one day possess men's ears. He believed that his name would be symphonised on their lips with Milton and Dryden and Keats. This he told me himself in words too quiet, obscure, and long ago for record. But he knew that Time would reap first."