The Hound of Heaven

I have been slow to post here this summer, but felt compelled after finding this great nugget on the Internet. The poem The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson is one of my favorite poems in the English language. It is a poem that must be heard and not simply read to be fully understand.  Thompson's ability with both the meaning and feel of words is simply genius.  The poem is about man's tendency to seek happiness in so many lesser things, and in so doing failing to seek the goodness in God.  And at the same time, it reveals the ever persevering love of God that chases us in that very quest for lesser goods, which we fail to realize is nothing more than man's natural desire for God alone. Thompson's ability to pace the words helps convey the sense of the 'chase' -- as hounds in a hunt. The story of the poet himself, Francis Thompson, is also interesting.  He was a drug addict and lived a rather tortured life, in many ways the cliche of the tortured poet.  But most modern "tortured poets" ever produced anything so beautiful.

You can find the text to the poem here, or with illustrations here, or with glossed notes here.  There are some more wonderful illustrations (an example of which is to the left), from R.H. Ives Gammel, here.

So, you can imagine how excited I was when I found on the Internet a version of the poem as read by Richard Burton, one of the great actors of the 20th century.  This is pure gold:

Oh blithersome couturier

In the on-line magazine Commentary, the writer John Podhoretz has a beautiful tribute to his sister, Rachel Abrams, who died earlier this month of cancer.  The article is worth reading in its entirety.  One part I particularly enjoyed was a bit of poetry that Mr. Podhoretz shared from his sister Rachel.   It seems that she was none too fond of a certain Washington writer, which she expertly dispatched in these few lines of poetry:

Oh blithersome couturier of wordifactious spewage,
Your loathsome predilection for effluxicating brewage
Has found its proper gallery in hurricanus sewage.

Oh odious splendiferatious tonguer of all piety,
Ambassador-at-very-large for platitudiniety,
Your prosody’s ontology’s all Sartric nullibiety.

It’s thus we say, with due respect, and many years’ assizing:
Oh, literary colporteur, the words of your devising
Appear to land upon the page without palpable revising.

St. Thomas says that one way you know an expert in a given activity is that he can make mistakes on purpose.  The novice pianist hits the wrong key because he doesn't yet have the art mastered.  When the virtuoso hits the wrong key, it's only because he is doing it on purpose.  Moreover, the expert's ability to derivate creatively from the usual rules of note and meter to create an even more profound musical effect shows how truly talented he is.  The same can be true for language. This woman was a virtuoso of the English language.

The whole article is available here, and definitely worth a read.  Requiescat in pace.