East, ah, east of Himalay
Dwell the nations underground;
Hiding from the shock of Day,
For the sun's uprising sound:
Dare not issue from the ground
At the tumults of the Day,
So fearfully the sun doth sound,
Clanging up beyond Cathay,
For the great earth-quaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay.
Lastly, Thompson's poetry impresses one with a sense of sublimity, in the strict, literal meaning of the word, which is upliftedness. Thompson seems always uplifted to a high level of inspiration; his wing seems never to flag nor his voice to tire. The reason for this consistent loftiness of Thompson's poetry is probably that to Thompson the writing of poetry was an act of worship, and that the main spring of his inspiration is religious enthusiasm. He never wrote except when he felt that he must write. He was only, he says, the conduit-pipe through which flowed the divine utterance. Speaking of poets he says:
We speak a lesson taught we know not how,
And what it is that from us flows
The hearer better than the utterer knows.
In every line of Thompson's verse one finds evidence of "the vision and the faculty divine," and when after his brief period of song that vision faded and that faculty failed, he wrote no more. Thompson wrote because he must write. Like Keats he was haunted perpetually by an image of the ideal Beauty, to which he was ever striving to attain. Poetry sometimes seems to him his curse, and not his blessing.
Deaf is he to the world's tongue;
He scorneth for his song
The loud
Shouts of the crowd.
He measureth world's pleasure
World's ease, as Saints might measure;
For hire
Just love entire.
He asks, not grudging pain;
And knows his asking vain,
And cries
Love, love, and dies,
In guerdon of long duty
Unowned by Love or Beauty;
And goes—
Tell, tell who knows.
Francis Thompson was accustomed to crest all his manuscripts with the sign of the cross; and just as all his verse may be said to have been written under the inspiration of the cross, so his life may be said to have been lived under its shadow. The Hand that wrought out his destiny must have placed over its finished work the sign of mingled shame and glory, of suffering and triumph. Life was too strong for Thompson; it crushed him beneath its hurrying feet; it stunned him with its tumults; it withheld from him the love for which his soul craved; but out of the defeat of his life rose the triumph of his verse.
It seems that Thompson sank to the lowest depths of life's misery that he might rise to its highest pinnacle of inspiration. It was when pitiless London had almost crushed the life out of him, and when his eyes were blinded with pain to the things around him, that the heavenly vision was clearest. On the day when he, "poor thief of song," was nailed to his bitterest cross, he heard most clearly a voice saying, "To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise."