Blogging at Hound of Heaven starts here...

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 midst 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 unperturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

                They beat – and a Voice beat

                More instant than the Feet –

“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”

Francis Thompson published The Hound of Heaven, of which this is the opening stanza, in 1893. At the age of 34 he was emerging from a profound crisis.  Born in Preston to a doctor and a mother who died young, he had received a good education at Ushaw, the Catholic college in Durham, but rebelled when required by his father to study medicine and took himself off to London. I’ve little doubt the early loss of his mother caught up with him here. He was soon reduced to living on the street selling matches and calling cabs. After three years of destitution, neuralgia and opium addiction, he was rescued first by a sympathetic prostitute and then by the publisher Wilfred Meynell who recognised the quality of work Thompson had sent him. Meynell’s wife Alice, the celebrated poet and suffragist, cared for Thompson as his health was restored and introduced him to writers in her circle including George Meredith and Wilfred Scawen Blunt. Nearly two decades of creativity followed before his death from tuberculosis in 1907.

The language of the poem is dated now (Thompson could not have foreseen the Titanic disaster) but The Hound of Heaven has enjoyed wide fame: Chesterton, Wilde, Tolkien and CS Lewis were admirers, Daphne du Maurier quoted it in Rebecca, the Supreme Court of the USA also quoted it in enforcing school desegregation in 1955: Richard Burton made a recording which is preserved on YouTube, and a few lines were even recited in an episode of ‘Inspector Morse’.

In calling this site Hound of Heaven I am not, needless to say, claiming identification with Christ!  I have borrowed from Thompson for a number of reasons.  

Firstly, I like the reversal of expectation he has conjured up, replacing the usual bothering-God approach to prayer with instead being bothered, being pursued, even being afraid. It gives a guarantee of the kind of compelling experience also found in John Donne.    Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you /As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

This immediacy and freshness is born out of the violence of the language – the jolt set up by the enjambment of precipitated and Adown: the paradox present in unhurrying chase. 

I am drawn as well  to Thompson’s psychological awareness – my own mind can feel at times like a dark underground with - who knows - a Minotaur or two hiding there. I wonder if he read William James, whose pragmatic approach to knowing was evident in The Principles of Psychology in 1890. “Anything short of God is not rational”, James wrote in Reflex Action and Theism. “Anything more than God is not possible".

It becomes clear that Thompson inhabited this same set of boundaries when the Hound shocks the reader with a coruscating truth at the end of the stanza. “You’ll find the whole world feels against you,  if you cannot bring yourself to acknowledge me.” All the paranoia and despair one expects from leading a life of Dickensian horror is this line. At the culmination of the poem 167 lines later, the Hound reveals the truth of love, laying bare the poet’s projection of his own fear and hostility in much the same manner as George Herbert’s conclusion to Love Bade Me Welcome. “Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, / I am He Whom thou seekest! ”

A hound is of course an unlikely image of Christ, albeit a dog with feet instead of paws, a dog that also speaks. John O’Conor, a Jesuit contemporary of Thompson’s, found it unsettling. “The name is strange. It startles one at first. It is so bold, so new, so fearless. It does not attract, rather the reverse.” Dogs do get a bad name in the bible: they’re dirty, disgraceful and dangerous. Having lived in Africa, I know this to be the general case with dogs, outside the pooch-loving societies such as our own. That said, I live with a lurcher – that’s him in the painting – and I am indebted to him for lessons in loyalty, patience and… doggedness. I am also referencing the Dominicans via the old Latin pun, domini canes – dogs of the lord. It is among them that I have enjoyed a level-headed and inspiring introduction to Catholicism. 

In future posts I will be reflecting on the history, culture and practice of all kinds of Christianity in our times, reviewing books, commenting on items in the press, and sharing inspiration. Coming up soon, reviews of –

God is Watching You: how the fear of God makes us human by the biologist and political scientist Dominic Johnson.

Linda Woodhead and Andrew Brown’s That Was The Church That Was: how the Church of England lost the English people.

Judas: the troubling history of the renegade apostle by author and journalist Peter Stanford

Being a Beast, the account of living like a wild animal undertaken by former barrister and fellow Sheffielder, Charles Foster