Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) routinely offers intelligent television viewing, employing the best in Catholic faith and reason. But sometimes it offers something truly extraordinary such as its Oct. 16 special telling the story of the late and now largely forgotten 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and his famous 1893 poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” published in his first volume of poems.
Anyone who knows even a little about Joseph Pearce’s life story, a journey that has taken him from the far right British racialism of his youth, with more than a tinge of fascism 35 years ago, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism as a Chestertonian Catholic, and his life in America today as the director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, might well appreciate the fact that it is he narrating Francis Thompson’s story. Two Brits, two talented writers and two outsiders on the margins of the British society of their respective historical eras for more than a few years.
Thompson, a cradle Catholic from Preston in Lancashire, was rescued from the streets of London, where he lived under a bridge and was seemingly hopelessly addicted to laudanum – a then commonly available non-prescription, non-controlled tincture of opium containing about 10 per cent powdered opium by weight, the equivalent of one per cent morphine, which could be purchased from the local pharmacist – by Wilfrid Meynell, a Quaker convert to Roman Catholicism, and editor of the literary journal Merry England, who was impressed with his submission entitled “The Passion of Mary.”
Thompson, however, living largely in his own head, in a narcotic-induced dream and nightmare world, coping and surviving as best he could the hell of his real existence, had not expected Meynell to be impressed. He had no expectations really and no gauge to judge by. The 28-year-old Thompson had written to Meynell on Feb. 23, 1887:
“Dear Sir, In enclosing the accompanying article for your inspection, I must ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript. It is due, not to slovenliness, but to the strange places and circumstances under which it has been written. For me, no less than Parolles, the dirty nurse experience has something fouled. I enclose stamped envelope for a reply, since I do not desire the return of the manuscript, regarding your judgment of its worthlessness as quite final. I can hardly expect that where my prose fails my verse will succeed. Nevertheless, on the principle of ‘Yet will I try the last,’ I have added a few specimens of it, with the off chance that one may be less poor than the rest. Apologizing very sincerely for any intrusion on your valuable time, I remain yours with little hope,
Francis Thompson
“Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post Office.”
The two eventually met in person on the common ground of mutual respect and at Meynell’s instigation and in a singular act of charity, Thompson recovered much of his health at Our Lady of England Priory in Storrington in West Sussex, home to a Community of Canons Regular of Prémontré, also known as Norbertines after Norbert of Xanten, the founder of the order.
After he recovered his health and wrote his greatest poetry over the next decade and a half, Thompson succumbed to tuberculosis and died on Nov. 13, 1907, in the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth in London, at the age of 47. He is buried in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery at Kensal Green in London.
On the death of Thompson, G.K. Chesterton wrote in his September 1915 essay, “A Dead Poet” that, “With Francis Thompson we lose the greatest poetic energy since Browning. His energy was of somewhat the same kind. Browning was intellectually intricate because he was morally simple. He was too simple to explain himself; he was too humble to suppose that other people needed any explanation. But his real energy, and the real energy of Francis Thompson, was best expressed in the fact that both poets were at once fond of immensity and also fond of detail. Any common Imperialist can have large ideas so long as he is not called upon to have small ideas also. Any common scientific philosopher can have small ideas so long as he is not called upon to have large ideas as well. But great poets use the telescope and also the microscope”
A five-minute Vimeo trailer on the “The Hound of Heaven” 30-minute documentary aired by EWTN Oct. 16 was made last year by Oculus Studios of Lexington, Kentucky and can be found at
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