17 November: Boreham on Francis Thompson

A Ministrel of the Mire
This week marks the anniversary of the death of Francis Thompson. Is there to be found among all our romances and traditions, a story to be compared with this? One morning, nearly 70 years ago, dawn was breaking on the Thames embankment and the unhappy creatures whose poverty compelled them to spend the night among its shelters and recesses were beginning to stir. A steady drizzle was falling. Among the others, there rises slowly to his feet, a forlorn-looking waif, his toes peeping through his boots, his clothes in tatters, and his long and frowsy beard appearing desperately wild and dishevelled. He shuffles from the stone seat, shivering, coughs, pulls himself together, and faces grimly the prospect of another weary day. This is Francis Thompson.

Earning a few pence by selling matches, cleaning boots and holding horses' heads, he sleeps—or at least spends his nights—under the trees and the arches, and lives—or at least exists —on any morsels he can pick up. And yet, if one were to search him, a copy of Aeschylus would be found in one dirty pocket and the poems of Blake in another, while on greasy scraps of paper concealed about his person are some indecipherable lines that he himself has pencilled. And on some of the poems written under such conditions much of his fame still rests.

Songs That Were Born In the Slime
The son of a Manchester doctor, he was from childhood misunderstood. His father insisted on his studying medicine. Francis failed in all his examinations. The father at last accused him of drinking. Francis indignantly denied the charge and bounced out of the room. At that stage the trouble was not alcohol but opium. His mother had presented him with De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater." The youth had coveted the gorgeous dreams that De Quincey describes and lost the power of concentration in consequence. On slamming the door of his father's room, he hurried off to London and for three years drank the city's filthiest dregs. He herded with the lowest of the low and the vilest of the vile. And, though he himself never became immoral or debased, he endured horrors that darkened his mind, cruelly affected his health and left an indelible smudge upon his soul.

While still a citizen of the gutter he scrawled his stanzas. Many of them were written by the light of the street lamps, the crumpled paper spread out on a wall. He sent a collection of these strange bits and pieces to Mr. Wilfred Meynell, editor of "Merry England." "Kindly address your rejection," he wrote, "to the Charing Cross Post Office." Realising that he had struck gold, Mr. Meynell asked the poet to call on him, but the letter came back through the dead letter office. Then he published the verses and this brought the author to his door. "Show him up!" said Mr. Meynell. A singular apparition presented itself, drew back, crept forward again, drew back a second time, and, at the third venture, shambled in. Mr. Meynell could scarcely believe his eyes. The figure before him was more ragged and unkempt than the average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes.

Literature Has Its Noble Hospitalities
To their everlasting honour Mr. and Meynell took the ragged creature into their beautiful home, surrounded him with refinement, affection, and the laughter of happy children, and from that day to the day of his death Francis Thompson was one of the most loved and honoured personalities in English life and literature. J L Garvin declares that, for sheer grandeur, Milton is his only rival. He is, Garvin says, an argonaut of letters, far-travelled in the realms of gold. He built a new London in seraphic song. The city of his degradation became, to him, a suburb of the New Jerusalem. The angels hovered round Oxford Circus, the cherubim chanted their Holy, Holy, Holy, above the Mansion House and the Bank; Ezekiel's life-giving river flowed from underneath St Paul's; Jacob's Ladder was pitched 'twixt heaven and Charing Cross; Christ's holy feet trod the water, not of Gennesareth but Thames! Whether he sauntered along Edgeware Rd or turned his face towards Whitechapel, the city was haunted. A radiant Presence enfolded him everywhere. In every noisome alley he heard archangels sing.

Happily, his father lived to marvel at his triumph. But Francis could not hope to live long. At the age of 48, caressing Mr. Meynell's hand to the last limits of consciousness, he quietly passed away. In his coffin were roses from the garden of George Meredith, and on his breast were the violets that Mrs. Meynell placed there. Many of the stateliest homes in England were stricken with grief inconsolable. "Francis Thompson was a true poet, one of the small band," wrote George Meredith on the card attached to the roses. And so, amid the roses and the violets, we take our leave of him. He was said to be a moth of a man, but he was a moth of a man with the soul of a seraph, and very few of the commanding figures in the shining annals of our literary history are most sure of immortality than he.

F W Boreham

Image: Francis Thompson