FONTENOY, 1745

I. Before the Battle; night

Oh bad the march, the weary march, beneath these alien skies,
But good the night, the friendly night, that soothes our tired eyes.
And bad the war, the tedious war, that keeps us sweltering here,
But good the hour, the friendly hour, that brings the battle near.
That brings us on the battle, that summons to their share
The homeless troops, the banished men, the exiled sons of Clare.

Oh little Corca Bascinn, the wild, the bleak, the fair!
Oh little stony pastures, whose flowers are sweet, if rare!
Oh rough and rude Atlantic, the thunderous, the wide,
Whose kiss is like a soldier's kiss which will not be denied!
The whole night long we dream of you, and waking think we're
there,-

Vain dream, and foolish waking, we never shall see Clare.

The wind is wild to-night, there's battle in the air;

The wind is from the west, and it seems to blow from Clare.
Have you nothing, nothing for us, loud brawler of the night?
No news to warm our hearts-strings, to speed us through the fight?
In this hollow, star-pricked darkness, as in the sun's hot glare,
In sun-tide, moon-tide, star-tide, we thirst, we starve for Clare!

Hark! yonder through the darkness one distant rat-tat-tat!
The old foe stirs out there, God bless his soul for that!
The old foe musters strongly, he's coming on at last,

And Clare's Brigade may claim its own wherever blows fall fast.
Send us, ye western breezes, our full, our rightful share,
For Faith, and Fame, and Honour, and the ruined hearths of Clare.

FONTENOY, 1745

II.—After the Battle; early dawn, Clare coast

"Mary mother, shield us! Say, what men are ye,
Sweeping past so swiftly on this morning sea?"
"Without sails or rowlocks merrily we glide
Home to Corca Bascinn on the brimming tide."

"Jesus save you, gentry! why are ye so white, Sitting all so straight and still in this misty light? "Nothing ails us, brother; joyous souls are we, Sailing home together, on the morning sea.

"Cousins, friends, and kinsfolk, children of the land, Here we come together, a merry, rousing band; Sailing home together from the last great fight, Home to Clare from Fontenoy, in the morning light.

"Men of Corca Bascinn, men of Clare's Brigade,
Harken, stony hills of Clare, hear the charge we made;
See us come together, singing from the fight,
Home to Corca Bascinn, in the morning light."

FRANCIS THOMPSON

[BORN 1859, at Preston, where his father was a homoeopathic doctor. His parents and uncles, one of whom was a professor in the Catholic University, Dublin, were of the Roman Catholic religion, as was the son. Educated at Ushaw; at first intended for the priesthood, but afterwards studied medicine at Owens College, with no success. Unfortunately, having read De Quincey's Confessions, he took to opium; went to London 1885, and fell into the depths of poverty, but was discovered and rescued by Mr. and Mrs. Meynell, under whose protection he partly broke the evil habit, so that in 1893 he was able to issue his first volume of Poems, which ran through five editions in two years. Published Sister Songs 1895, and New Poems 1897, the last chiefly written in Wales, near the Franciscan Convent; and, later, various essays, reviews, and Catholic biographies. Died in London, of consumption, November 1907.]

Francis Thompson came very near to being a great, a very great, poet; he would pretty certainly have been one had he not clouded his brain and shortened his life by the indulgence referred to above. Never did plausible writing do greater harm than was done to this rare mind by those pages in which De Quincey glorifies opium, saying that whereas "wine robs a man of his self-possession, opium sustains and reinforces it. . . . Opium communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive. . . . The opium-eater feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount-that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity, and high over all the great light of the majestic intellect." Young Thompson believed all this, with the result that we know. But when, under the joint influence of religion and of more than parental care, he was able to write, his best work reached a standard attained by very few, whether of his own time or earlier. BurneJones, if we may refer to an often-quoted passage, declared in 1893 that "since Gabriel's Blessed Damozel, no mystical words had so touched him as The Hound of Heaven," and judgments not less enthusiastic were passed by Coventry Patmore, Wilfrid Blunt, and naturally enough-by Thompson's protectors, the

Meynells. About the same time he wrote, and dedicated to the young daughters of his friends, a volume of Sister Songs; we quote from it some lines which both illustrate the grateful affection which he felt to the family and give a pathetic picture of the misery from which they had delivered him. In the interval between 1893 and the publication of New Poems (1897), his genius, we will not say ripened, but deepened; witness our third extract, which both in its grasp of the central idea and in its quick succession of vivid images comes very near to the great passages in Shakespeare. But there is another side. Thompson either could not or would not realize the beauty of simplicity. He became, to a greater and greater degree, consciously and wilfully abstruse, and many of his later verses are positively unintelligible, while he grew more and more fond of néologismes, new words, old words with new terminations, and, to use a much-ridiculed phrase of his own, "the illuminous and volute redundance" of sounds. In fact, such is his inequality that Mrs. Meynell, the one "authorized" exponent, has found it desirable to publish a volume of Selections, though the aggregate of his poems is so small. Still, it is well to remember that one success in poetry outweighs many failures; and two of the three poems from which we quote are successes that no survey of modern English verse can afford to overlook.

EDITOR.

THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 1

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes, I sped;

And shot, precipitated

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after,

But with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbéd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

1 These selections from Francis Thompson's poems are reprinted by permission of the publishers, John Lane Company.

They beat-and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet

"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."
I pleaded, outlaw-wise,

By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
Trellised with intertwining charities;

(For, though I knew His love Who followed,
Yet was I sore adread

Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside)
But, if one little casement parted wide,

The gust of His approach would clash it to;
Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.
Across the margent of the world I fled,

And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their changéd bars;
Fretted to dulcet jars

And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.
I said to dawn: Be sudden-to eve: Be soon;
With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over
From this tremendous Lover!

Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!
I tempted all His servitors, but to find

My own betrayal in their constancy,
In faith to Him their fickleness to me,

Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit,

To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;

Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.

But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,

The long savannahs of the blue;

Or whether, Thunder-driven,

They clanged His chariot 'thwart a heaven,

Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet:Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.

Still with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbéd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

Came on the following Feet,

And a Voice above their beat

"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

I sought no more that, after which I strayed,

In face of man or maid;