Thompson, Francis : (1859-1907), a Catholic English poet of the Aesthetic movement of the 1890s, he wrote The Hound of Heaven.
... Tagore, Rabindranath 3-5, 13, 17, 19, 47, Tasso 381,383 Tate, Allen 314, 366,390-392, 414, 419 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 315, 344, 345, 396, Thompson, Francis 270,311 Thought the Paraclete 42, 321 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 10,19, 25 Tillyard, E.M.W. 337,379,395, 445 456 Tod, James 51 Turner, W.J. 310-312 Underhill ...
... -"Salutation", 266n Tantras, the, 28-9, 165 Terence, 239n The Eternal Wisdom, 131 Theocritus, 86 . The Times Literary Supplement, 62n., 126n Thibon, Gustave, 126-7 Thompson, Francis, 143 -"The Hound of Heaven", 143n Times, 127 Titan, 97, 159 Turkey, 284 UCHATHYA, 163 Uma,170 United Nations Organization, 263 Upanishads, the, 6, 8-9, ll-12, 15, 23, ...
... Synecdoche,18, 85 Synesius, Bishop, 50 Swedenborg, 262 Swinburne, 23,24, 30 Taylor, Thomas, 134 Temenos, 50 fn. 23 That Night, 49 Tharmas, 4,141,142 Thompson, Francis, 73 Todd, 102 Traditions,Neoplatonic,Gnostic, Hermetic, Cabbalistic and Alchemical, 167 Trinitarianism, 101 Trinity, The, 54,96,102 Trusler, J., 3 Tutiensus, Rupertus ...
... Truth 38,86 Supermind 51,58 Supernature 12,128,208,273,315 Swinburne 42,127 T Tagore, Rabindranath 34, 70 Tantra 273 Tennyson 66,216,259 Thibaudet 62 Thompson, Francis 20,22,27,108 transformation power of true 273 translation 210 true soul 28,160 Truth-Consciousness 51 Turiya 99 U Upanishads 3,37,61,141,200,207 Usha ...
... Tara Jauhar 691, 710 Tea Ceremony 194-5, 287-8, 319, 321 Teilhard de Chardin 732 Teresa, Saint 38, 62, 129 Teresa, Mother 552 Théon, Alma 21-5 Théon, Max 21-5, 191 Thompson, Francis 28 Thoreau, H.D. 186, 485 Tiruvalluvar 485 Tilak, Lokamanya E.G. 199 Togo Mukherjee 723. Tolstoy, Leo 108, 186, 485 Truman, President Harry 488 Udar (L.M. Pinto) 278-9 ...
... Tegart, Sir Charles, 287 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 442,443ff Telang, K. T., 15 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 164, 177,615, 690 Tehmi, 595 Théon, M., 396 Thompson, Francis, 631 Thor, with Angels, 147 Thornhill, T.,310,370 Thought the Paraclete. 632-34 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 16, 19, 63, 189, 190, 192, 201, 206, 222, 227, 229, 235 ...
... something beyond the external material existence, then there are several mystic passages in his poems. NIRODBARAN: Dilip asks whether Francis Thompson can be called a great poet. SRI AUROBINDO: Here, again, we must ask: what is meant by "great"? At any rate, Thompson has written one great poem, "The Hound of Heaven", and he who writes a great poem is necessarily great. NIRODBARAN: Dilip does admit... great poem. SRI AUROBINDO: Thompson's poem is great in a peculiar way. Of course, if you take the mass of his work into account you may say he is not great. "Greatness" too can be variously defined. NIRODBARAN: I can only say that poets like Shakespeare are great. Also Wordsworth and Shelley can be called great poets. PURANI: Through "The Hound of Heaven" Thompson has expressed a whole life-... us in only one complete poem: the rest of her is in mere snatches. Still, she is hailed as a great poet. So there can be no fixed standard by which one can judge the greatness of a poet. As to Thompson and Wilde and Chesterton, I believe "The Hound of Heaven" is greater than any poem by the last two. ...
... can deserve to be called a great poet. SRI AUROBINDO: Haven't we already dealt with this question? All depends on the poem. If a poet has written a few perfect lyrics he can be called great. Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven" makes him great. We spoke also of Sappho and Simonides. NIRODBARAN: Yes, I told Dilip about Sappho and about the fragments Simonides wrote. SRI AUROBINDO: Simonides did... below Shakespeare and Milton. But can Browning be taken to be a greater poet than Thompson? Has he any single poem as great as "The Hound of Heaven"? NIRODBARAN: Satyendra Dutt was also called a great poet once. SRI AUROBINDO : Is he equal to Browning? NIRODBARAN: Dilip says English critics don't think of Thompson as a great poet, certainly not as being on a level with Wordsworth and Shelley... established reputation. I consider Thompson a great poet because he has expressed an aspect of Truth with such force and richness as no other poet before him has done, and he has dealt with one of the greatest subjects the human mind can take up. But what is the general opinion of his other poems? NIRODBARAN: I don't know. Dilip doesn't find much in them, Thompson is known only by this one poem, he ...
... besides the pantheistic, an aching eye towards Plato's Archetype as well as a dissolving gaze into Spinoza's Substance. It is to Francis Thompson that we must turn for a recurrence of Shelley's transcendental touch — with important discontinuities in form, Thompson being a somewhat fanatical adherent to the Roman Church, yet with so basic a connection with Shelley that whenever he writes about Shelley... of a thousand dreams. Even the Thompson who hurls forth the opening rhythms of The Hound of Heaven — I fled Him down the nights and down the days; I fled Him down the arches of the years; 1. I take this and the preceding quotation after Mr. M é groz who also discusses Shelleyan affinities in his admirable study: Francis Thompson: The Poet of Earth in Heaven. Page... audacity of colour, an adventurous and creative and re-shaping word-passion. There would be interwoven with his uniqueness something of the original Shelley, something of Swinburne, something of Francis Thompson. But he must fight free, on the one hand, of an inclination to dilute his meaning and haze off his expressive units and, on the other, of a lapse into unorganised though abundant thought-stuff ...
... is vision necessarily vague because it is too unfamiliar to be quickly grasped. My critic offered me phrases from Francis Thompson as examples of vivid mystical vision. But to be authentic mysticism, one's images and metaphors have to be alive with a subtle inner reality. Francis Thompson has that "aliveness" in many of his poems, but I am afraid the Page 139 phrases quoted to me were... compound noun and evokes the suppressed "sight", the implication of brightness, of light, in the word "glory". Some compound epithets from Keats and Thompson were quoted by my critic as of the right poetic sort. They were fine; but Thompson's "tawny-coloured" though poetic enough, does not strike me as anything subtle when applied to a desert - it belongs to the effective outward style of poetry ...
... poetry. Neither in modern Page 51 Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these, the versatile English language has acquired a unique capacity for strangely suggestive effects - the super-subtle... -Keats's enchanted luxuriance, through allegory and symbol and myth, in the Sovereign Beauty that is Sovereign Truth - Patmore's pointed polished ardour of the intellect for "the unknown Eros"- Francis Thompson's restless and crowded and colourful heat of response to "the many-splendoured Thing" - Yeats's bewitched echo to the Immortal Loveliness in its world-wandering -AE's crystalline contact with ...
... sufficient power of language and rhythm, that is what is required of you. In drama one is concerned with drawing characters with life and its reactions. I suppose what he wants is something more like Francis Thompson's poetry. PURANI: And Gerard Hopkins? SRI AUROBINDO: No, for Hopkins has many compound words. The reviewer also thinks that Paraclete means advocate, and there is no advocacy in the poem ...
... silent for a while) : It really comes to this: "You can't be a great poet unless you write like me!" (After a short pause) Take, for instance, Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven". How many people understand and appreciate it? Does it follow that Thompson is not a great poet? Milton is not understood by many. He is not a great poet then? NIRODBARAN: Tagore doesn't raise the question of understanding ...
... for His other self, can provide a solution of celestial history and, through it, of the destinies of both man and the world." 32 There is, for example, the symbol of the Hound of Heaven, which Francis Thompson has Page 267 turned into a wonderful poem. In the Rig Veda, there are references to Sarama and the Sarameya, her two dogs; some pursuit is implied and the 'quarry' is ...
... is something which brings up a convincing picture of life, sets before us a whole living situation of the Spirit. "Expressive" is just that which communicates feeling, vision or experience. In Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven", for instance, you get a true creative picture. Blake was often confused and was a failure when he tried to be creative in his prophetic poems. NIRODBARAN: You wrote to X... creative poetry? SRI AUROBINDO: That a complete picture of life is given. Thus "The Hound of Heaven" brings intensely before us the picture of the life of a man when pursued by God. SATYENDRA: Thompson had some experience of what he has written. SRI AUROBINDO: Oh, yes. NIRODBARAN: It seems to me that Nishikanto is not quite a success in what is called mystic poetry. SRI AUROBINDO: What ...
... cheapest sense of universality? Rudyard Kipling's s Barrack Room Ballads exercises a more universal appeal than was ever reached by Milton or Keats—we will say nothing of writers like Blake or Francis Thompson; a band on the pier at a seaside resort will please more people than a great piece of music with the orchestration conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. In a world of gods it might be true that the ...
... operated upon several times, but not being identified with the body and living in the Self, he was able to remain indifferent to all of it. 277From the poem "The Hound of Heaven" by Francis Thompson (1859-1907). What it means in this context is that if the soul is ready within, but the outer nature is not, conditions of life get arranged in such a way that it appears that the Divine is... that all the pain had vanished and was replaced by delight, by joy. These are concrete experiences that happen even today. I am reminded of these two lines from the poem "The Kingdom of God" by Francis Thompson: "Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,/ Cry - clinging to Heaven by the hems". Well, some cry, some don't cry, some call out to the Divine aloud, some don't, but the truth is that the Divine... have heard of the soul being addressed as a bride, as a mother, but, for the first time, I've heard it called "daughter". Fathers may appreciate and understand at once the value of a daughter, but Thompson was not a father. From the poetic point of view, I think the whole beauty of this line would have been murdered if it had the words "my soul, my son" (Laughter) or "my soul, my bride" instead ...
... the sound here those of the famous finale of Francis Thompson's sonnet The Heart. Thompson recalls the act of that fierce Roman patriot Sextus Curtius who jumped, horse-backed and full-armoured, into the deep trench which according to the augurs had to be filled with what Rome deemed most precious if she was to escape heavenly punishment. Thompson creates an image magnificently profound about the... intricate power troubling the Unknown; Vaughan a half-obscure half-bright straining beyond thought into mystical vision; Patmore a pointed polished ardour of the intellect for the veiled Wonder; Francis Thompson a restless and crowded and colourful heat of response to "the many-splen-doured Thing". All of them have flights of fine poetry, but their styles, standing out one from another, have yet a common... as a chaotic transcription of the Subconscious, for there are evident a process and a denouement, but this control and guidance of the abnormal paints no picture that can be understood like Francis Thompson's gorgeous fantasy of unrest: Across the margent of the world I fled, And troubled the gold gateways of the stars, or his mightily imagined call from the Inscrutable: Yet ever ...
... it characterised? First of all, an intellectualism that requires a reasoned and rational synthesis of all experiences. Another poet, a great poet of the soul's Dark Night was, as we all know, Francis Thompson: it was in his case not merely the soul's night, darkness extended even to life, he lived the Dark Night actually and physically. His haunting, weird lines, seize within their grip our brain and... and mind and very flesh – My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,¹ or, Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour The night's slow-wheel'd car.. . . But Thompson was not an intellectual, his doubts and despondencies were not of the mental order, he was a boiling, swelling life-surge, a geyser, a volcano. He, too, crossed the Night and saw the light of Day, but ...
... the seventeenth-century "Metaphysicals", in order to add some thing about them to your Future Poetry.... There is another gap also, perhaps as serious: there is nothing about Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson and Alice Meynell. And one other name—not belonging to either group but verging on the mystical domain—is worth inclusion: Christina Rossetti. Perhaps something on Gerard Manly Hopkins wouldn't... Mare, all of whom you know. There are about a hundred of them moderns, Spender + x + y + z + p² etc. Before that there were Hopkins and Flecker and others and before that Meredith and Hardy and Francis Thompson. You can tackle any of them you can lay your hands on in the library. Watson and Brooke and other Edwardians and Georgians would not be good for you. 16 October 1938 Originality is all right... Lawrence 5 —in what do they differ from the Page 418 old poetry except in having a less sure rhythmical movement, a less seizing perfection of language? It is a fine image and Keats or Thompson would have made out of it something unforgettable. But after reading these lines one has a difficulty in recalling any clear outline of image, any seizing expression, any rhythmic cadence that goes ...
... La Mare, all of whom you know. There are about a hundred of them moderns, Spender + x y z p2 etc. Before that they were Hopkins and Fletcher and others and before that Meredith and Hardy and Francis Thompson. You can tackle any of them you can lay your hands on in the library. Watson and Brooke and other Edwardians & Georgians would not be good for you. October 16, 1938 [After making... 10.38]. I thought you wanted to read the modern poets in order to help your style, so I suggested the names. Naturally their substance has little kinship with the things we try to write. They say Thompson's has, but I don't know his poetry very well. By the way, do you know why Arjava has stopped writing? He wrote a beautiful poem the other day—but his inspiration has become fitful and far between ...
... and beast and earth and air and sea Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst... About this Pantheism of Shelley's, which the Roman Catholic poet Francis Thompson who was deeply sympathetic to the Shelleyan imagination found yet extremely incongenial, no truer words have been written than by another Roman Catholic poet, Alfred Noyes. He reads in it no real... universal Loveliness, he does not mean a dissolution into material Nature as Thompson supposes: he means, says Noyes, an entry into a divine Spirit within Nature and to be part of it is not to be individually annulled, either. Here is neither the sleep of death in which our dissolved elements circulate in Nature's veins, as Thompson thought when con-sidering Shelley's Pantheism, nor a loss of individuality ...
... here those of the famous finale of Francis Thompson's sonnet The Heart. Thompson recalls the act of that fierce Roman patriot Sextus Curtius who jumped, horse-backed and full-armoured, into the deep trench which according to the augurs had to be Page 20 filled with what Rome deemed most precious if she was to escape heavenly punishment. Thompson creates an image magnificently profound... which guided him from the sins of the flesh to the soul's ecstasy of worship. Crashaw wrote a hymn in honour of St. Teresa, lauding her devotion to Christ and her transforming influence on men. Francis Thompson made a shrine for Alice Meynell: she was the religious calm-centre to the storm of his much-tossed and vagrant career. Wordsworth imagined how the "overseeing power" of Nature would build up the... concealed spaciousness of divine being. Technically we might say that the second line in Thompson fails to be overhead because of the crowdedly repetitive clipped sounds "till" and "did" and "build". The overhead rhythm needs a different art - and behind the art a different psychological disposition. Thompson's opening line has nothing markedly counter to the overhead art; somehow the right psychological ...
... turn of my earlier poetic expression. I have not read the other later poets of the decline. Of subsequent writers or others not belonging to this decline I know only A. E. and Yeats, something of Francis Thompson, especially the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God , and a poem or two of Gerard Hopkins; but the last two I came across very late, Hopkins only quite recently, and none of them had any... suggest this reason when he compares this difference to the difference of his approach as between Lycidas and Paradise Lost . His temperamental turn is shown by his special appreciation of Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore and his response to Descent and Flame-Wind and the fineness of his judgment when speaking of the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God , its limitation by his approach... high-pitched poetry as rhetorical and unsound and declamatory, wherever he did not see in it something finely and subtly true coexisting with the high-pitched expression,—the combination we find in Thompson's later poem and it is this he seems to have missed in Savitri . For Savitri does contain or at least I intended it to contain what you and others have felt in it but he has not been able to feel ...
... sight of the terror-stricken hunted beast seeking shelter in bush and 2 Ibid., p. 236. Page 243 thicket, ultimately succumbing to its inevitable Fate. Yet it was to Francis Thompson alone that the privilege was vouchsafed to see in it the whole enigma of human life with its agonies and torments seeking refuge in temporary joys and supports, ultimately recognising the Divine... infant joy! Arise and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy. And we have not to ask of the stars in motion If they have rumour of thee there. Because, as Francis Thompson perceives, Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars! The drift of pinions would we hearken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors. ...
... markedly simple and Page 4 direct on one side, was on the other luxuriant if not labyrinthine too. And he would have never been so foolish as to deny the furor poeticus to Francis Thompson in a passage like the following from Sister Songs: Oh! may this treasure-galleon of my verse, Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme, Set with a towering press ...
... in poetry. Neither in modern Europe nor anywhere else do we find such a poetic galaxy as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Francis Thompson and Yeats. If we may add from those to whom English was native outside England, there is the free-verse giant, Whitman. In consequence of the intensely inspired impact of poets like these... artistic luxuriance, through allegory and symbol and legend, in the Sovereign Beauty that is Sovereign Truth - Patmore's pointed polished ardour of the intellect for "the unknown Eros" - Francis Thompson's colourful heat of response to "the many-spendoured Thing" - Gerard Manley Hopkins's quiver and flash of aspiration within a God-dedicated discipline - Yeats's bewitched or passionate ...
... Whitman (Oxford University Press, London, 1946). Mctaggart.J. McT. Ellis. Philosophical Studies (Edward Arnold, London, 1934). Page 488 Megroz, R.L. Francis Thompson : The Poet of Earth in Heaven (Faber & Gwyer, London, 1927). Meyerhoff, Hans. Time in Literature (University of California Press, 1955). Miller, Henry. The Air-Conditioned... Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus, and the Literature of Revolt (Oxford University Press, London, 1959). Dante, Alighieri. The Vision: or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, translated by Henry Francis Cary (Oxford University Press, London, 1923). The Divine Comedy, translated by Charles Eliot Norton (Great Books of the Western World, William Benton, Chicago, 1952). ...
... of God in a language reminiscent of the dog-world: that gripping Grace without which none can hope to be even within ten thousand miles of the Supermind can best be designated, after the poet Francis Thompson, as the Hound of Heaven, a Power which is all the time after us with a hound's tenacity in order to save us in spite of ourselves! More prosaically but still pointedly we may declare that we shall ...
... the fourth century kept ringing in my ears. There was that powerful insight into the Divine Nature and its strange dealings with the world, which might be considered to have flashed out to Francis Thompson the "majestic instancy" of his Hound of Heaven : "And lo! Thou pressing at the heel of those who are fleeing from Thee. God of Vengeance and yet Fountain of Pity, who turnest us back to... difference between abiding in the soul and residing very near to it and only sometimes merging in it distinguishes the religious saint from the saint who is spiritual. In the latter category are Francis and Teresa and John of the Cross. Although I do not have Augustine's morbidity about 'sin' nor his attachment to a formal pietism, he is a magnified and consummated version of what I am at the moment ...
... unfinished world And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss - [p. 17] where the intellectual style is clean overpassed may be juxtaposed with the well-known phrases of Francis Thompson's about the human heart's unrealised grandeurs: The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink– Yet shall that chasm, till He who these did build An awful Curtius make Him yawn... ed, into the deep trench which according to the augurs had to be packed with what Rome deemed most precious if she was to escape heavenly punishment, it is equally certain that he had not seen Thompson's lines where some of the very words used by Sri Aurobindo - "world", "chasm", "fill" - occur. We become aware how an afflatus with the same charge, as it were, of imaginative words comes in sheer ...
... imagining and feeling and in the temperature of word and rhythm. A similar difference is also perceived if we consider non-Overhead lines with an analogous drift revealed from another angle — Francis Thompson's The angels keep their ancient places; — Turn but a stone, and start a wing! Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces, That miss the many-splendoured thing. ...
... language of Hopkins—quite a famous poet now in spite of your not having heard of him—a fore-runner of present day poetry. He tried to do new things with the English language. A Catholic poet like Francis Thompson. What's Bedlamic, please? Never heard of him, I'm sure! Bedlam is or was the principal lunatic asylum in England. You have never heard the expression "Bedlam let loose" etc.? Bedlamic ...
... author a living flesh of significance quite original and individual to oneself. Several of my poems are born in this way and the debt I owe most for such inspiration is, among English writers, to Francis Thompson. It is a kind of plagiarism which is often practised by poets, even by very great ones, and most legitimately too so long as one either improves the matter adopted or clothes it in a novel hue... speak not of Matter and Manner but Matter and Spirit. It is indeed Spirit, a transcendent Beauty perceived by the writer, that shapes a piece of poetry, though it may act on different levels in a Francis Thompson and in a Baudelaire. But its presence is unmistakable on whatever plane and in whatever personality it may shimmer through the veil of articulate sound. On a congenial level of manifestation it ...
... Shelleyan, ethereally entangled aspects by the right end? And would they have relished the bold and colourful intricacy that is so Page 22 magnificent in certain portions of Francis Thompson? Would the Celtic twilight of Yeats with its labyrinths of vanishing iridescence have found any place in their subtle yet "sunny" consciousness? Intellectual criss-cross and sophisticated maziness ...
... his being: I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon. But this is more related to the adventurously imaginative style of Francis Thompson and we feel that for all its magnificence the knowledge is not directly Yogic. A similar impression we get vis-à-vis Tagore's lyrical soars, high and intense though they are, as in the lines... moments is here, an instinctive sense of the Spirit's ether and a moved felicity of articulation. Sri Aurobindo comes also at times recognisably with turns that have been admirably practised by the Thompsons and Iqbals, the Shelleys and Tagores of man's aspiration; but every now and then come effects of the direct Yogi, tranquilly amazing, as in There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown ...
... being: I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon. But this is more related to the adventurously imaginative style of Francis Thompson and we feel that for all its magnificence the knowledge is not directly Yogic. A similar impression we get vis- à -vis Tagore's lyrical soars, high and intense though they are, as in the lines... moments is here, an instinctive sense of the Spirit's ether and a moved felicity of articulation. Sri Aurobindo comes also at times recognisably with turns that have been admirably practised by the Thompsons and Iqbals, the Shelleys and Tagores of man's aspiration; but every now and then come effects of the direct Yogi, tranquilly amazing, as in There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown ...
... going down to its level. 17-1-1940 (The talk centred round Tagore's letter to Nishikanta concerning poetry.) Sri Aurobindo : Take Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. Everybody does not understand it : does it follow that Thompson is not a great poet? Or take the Upanishads. They deal with one subject only and have one strain : can we say, therefore, that it is not great poetry... is the thoughts, the feelings and the images that rise in the poet's mind that you get when you read the poem. 27-1-1940 Disciple : I had a talk with X and he asks : How can Francis Thompson be called a great poet because he has written one poem the Hound of Heaven which is great ? Sri Aurobindo : What do you mean by "great”? At any rate it is a great poem and one who ...
... if by a wide sweeping descent from an ether of superhuman being, high above our mind's centre in the brain. It has not been absent from English literature: Vaughan, Wordsworth, Shelley, Francis Thompson and AE have it perhaps morefrequendy, but no English poet has proved continually a channel of its peculiar intensity. For that matter it is no more than sporadic in all languages except Sanskrit ...
... the uncaring infinite vastness, So now he seemed to the sight that sees all things from the Real— we may set Francis Thompson's lines in Sister Songs: As down the years the splendour voyages Of some long-ruined and night-submerged star... Thompson aims, as subsequent lines show, to suggest the poet being survived by his poetry. A moving and original use, this, of a majestic... chasm of the unfinished world And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss— where the intellectual style is clean overpassed may be juxtaposed with the well-known phrases of Francis Thompson's about the human heart's unrealised grandeurs: The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink— Yet shall that chasm, till He who these did build An awful Curtius make Him... their lives after the artist's personal disappearance from life: some deathless Artist Power which has fashioned the whole universe is conjured up in all Its immense and omniscient supremacy. Thompson, in essential significance, was anticipated by Longfellow in his poem Charles Sumner, ending: Page 359 Were a star quenched on high, For ages would its light, Still ...
... being: I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon. But this is more related to the adventurously imaginative style of Francis Thompson and we feel that for all its magnificence the knowledge is not directly Yogic. A similar impression we get vis-à-vis Tagore's lyrical soars, high and intense though they are, as in the lines... moments is here, an instinctive sense of the Spirit's ether and a moved felicity of articulation. Sri Aurobindo comes also at times recognisably with turns that have been admirably practised by the Thompsons and Iqbals, the Shelleys and Tagores of man's aspiration; but every now and then come effects of the direct Yogi, tranquilly amazing, as in There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown ...
... of my earlier poetic expression. I have not read the other later poets of the decline. Of subsequent writers or others not belonging to this decline I know only A. E. and Yeats, something of Francis Thompson, especially the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God, and a poem or two of Gerald Hopkins; but the last two I came across very late, Hopkins only quite recently, and none of them had... suggest this reason when he compares this difference to the difference of his approach as between Lycidas and Paradise Lost. His temperamental turn is shown by his special appreciation of Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore and his response to Descent and Flame-Wind and the fineness of his judgment when speaking of the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God, its limitation by his approach... Page 21 rhetorical and unsound and declamatory, wherever he did not see in it something finely and subtly true coexisting with the high-pitched expression, — the combination we find in Thompson's later poem and it is this he seems to have missed in Savitri. For Savitri does contain or at least I intended it to contain what you and others have felt in it but he has not been able to feel ...
... lasted, Sri Aurobindo never failed to guide our boat through all the poetic troubled waters and depressions of the spirit. That checkered history of which this 238 From the poem by Francis Thompson. Page 177 article is meant to serve as an introduction, I wish to unfold later on, not for any personal glorification, if any were possible, but to reveal the genius ...
... author of satires, epistles and elegies. Vaughan, Henry (1622 - 1695). A Welsh metaphysical poet and mystic. Crashaw, Richard (1613 -1649). English poet of metaphysical inspiration. Francis Thompson (1859 - 1907): English poet, author of "Hound of Heaven". 54. Blake, William (1757 -1827). English poet, painter and mystic. 55. Esha: Maya's daughter. 56. Adhar Das: a Professor ...
... itual subjects not proper for poetic treatment? But in that case much of Tagore's poetry would be improper, not to speak of much of Donne (now considered a great poet), Vaughan, Crashaw etc., Francis Thompson and I do not know how many others in all climes and ages. Is it the dealing with other worlds that makes it not proper? But what then about Blake, whose work Housman declares to be the essence ...
... ibid., p. 501. 280. 236. ibid., p. 501. 281. 237. ibid., p. 502. 282. 238. ibid., pp. 502-3. 239. ibid.,p. 503. 240. ibid.., p .503. Cf: Francis Thompson: Ah ! must-Designer infinite !— Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it? (The Hound ofHeaven). 241. Savitri, pp. 504-5. 242. ibid., p. 505.... poetry a multitudinous presentation of beauty; but mysticism is a self-consistent orientation of the whole personality, which may exclude much of the field of science, though not necessarily." (Francis Thompson, p. 189). 215. ibid., p. 856; also pp. 830-1 "... to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless ...
... the cheapest sense of universality? Rudyard Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads exercises a more universal appeal than was ever reached by Milton or Keats—we will say nothing of writers like Blake or Francis Thompson; a band on the pier at a seaside resort will please more people than a great piece of music with the orchestration conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. In a world of gods it might be true that the ...
... And still another: ... imagination's comet trail of dream. 113 The following is an image partly drawn from Nature and partly human life, and somewhat reminiscent of Shelley and Francis Thompson: The nude God-children in their play-fields ran Smiting the winds with splendour and with speed; Of storm and sun they made companions, Sported with the white mane of ...
... quest to newer infinities that may come here and work themselves out in the unending Time's process. Death is truly an aspect of life, for it to become deathless life. That would remind us of Francis Thompson's lines from his Ode to the Setting Sun: The fairest things in life are Death and Birth, And of these two the fairer thing is Death. But this is not crucified Christ as a ...
... by the Gods and as viewed by men fills us not only with its own sublimity but also with a sense of the far stretch and clairvoyant depth of a time-transcending Consciousness beyond the human. Francis Thompson in Sister Songs has an Page 64 analogous astronomical figure to suggest the poet being survived by his poetry. A moving use, this, yet not equal to Sri Aurobindo's in aura and ...
... demands a variety of tunes.”] Sri Aurobindo: It really comes to this: “You can’t be a great poet unless you write like me!”…Take, for instance, Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven. How many people understand and appreciate it? Does it follow that Thompson is not a great poet? Milton is not understood by many. He is not a great poet then?… What does it matter if there is no variety? Homer has written ...
... over perfumed purple seas Rocking the rich fawn shimmer of ship-lines, Huge nonchalance surcharged with memories!) English poetry is chockful of both economical and lavish wonders. Francis Thompson's In No Strange Land may be rated economical but can anybody apply the same epithet to his Hound of Heaven? I don't know whether you have dipped into William Watson, a wrongly neglected poet ...
... rhythms that come with a compulsive force, and the vibrations of this poetry - if they have potency enough - penetrate the mental and vital sheaths and reach the sahrdaya's soul. A poem like Francis Thompson's The Hound of Heaven makes on the reader an impact that is not capable of precise intellectual formulation. And this applies even more to Sri Aurobindo's Thought the Paraclete, Rose of God ...
... life. One can obtain true happiness and keep it constantly only by discovering one's psychic being and uniting with it. 22 September 1963 Sweet Mother, I often remember a poem by Francis Thompson and its refrain: "For though I knew His love who followèd Yet was I sore adread Lest having Him, I must have naught beside." That is our malady! Yes, that is what Sri Aurobindo ...
... to alter Blackstone's dictum and call Paradise Lost a poem which influenced Blake more than any other writing, the Bible included. Page 72 (b) According to a critic, Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven must have been born from a phrase flashed out by St. Augustine nearly fifteen centuries earlier in his Confessions: 65 " Et ecce tu, imminens dorso fugitivorum, Deus ultionis ...
... e—spiritual subjects not proper for poetic treatment? But in that case much of Tagore's poetry would be improper, not to speak of Donne (now considered a great poet), Vaughan, Crashaw, etc., Francis Thompson 53 and I don't know how many others in all climes and ages. Is it the dealing with other worlds that makes it not proper? But what then about Blake, 54 whose work Housman declares to be the... Page 92 at the greatest Vibhūtis, but they are not Avatars. For at that rate all religious founders would be Avatars—Joseph Smith (I think that is his name) of the Mormons, St. Francis of Assisi Calvin, Loyola and a host of others as well as Christ, Chaitanya or Ramakrishna. For faith, miracles, Bejoy Goswami,44 another occasion. I wanted to say this much more about Rama—which ...
... the four lines of Lawrence*—in what do they differ from the old poetry except in having a less sure rhythmical movement, a less seizing perfection of language ? It is a fine image and Keats or Thompson would have made out of it something unforgettable. But after reading these lines one has a difficulty in recalling any clear outline of image, any seizing expression, any rhythmic cadence that... constructed in his luminosity; there is more of the ethical put forward than of the spiritual or divine man. The Christ that has strongly lived in the Western saints and mystics is the Christ of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa and others. But apart from that, is it a fact that Christ has been strongly and vividly loved by Christians ? Only by a very few, it seems to me. As for Krishna, to judge him ...
... it does not come from above the head but from the heart. Moreover, it has nothing to do with the meaning of the lines; the words are merely the garments of the vibration. Whereas this line by Francis Thompson issues straight from the illumined mind: The abashless inquisition of each star. What essentially distinguishes the works that come from this plane is what Sri Aurobindo calls a luminous... possibility, to the fully awakened being. Without reincarnation, it would be hard to account for the dramatic difference of degrees among souls – for example, between that of a pimp and that of Dante or Francis of Assisi, or simply between that of a man who searches and an economic philistine , as Sri Aurobindo put it – unless one believes that spiritual development is merely a matter of education, environment ...
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