Many readers will be familiar with Francis Thompson's poem The Hound of Heaven. Here are its opening lines:
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 chasme'd hears
From those strong feet that followed, followed after
But with unhurrying chase and unperturbe'd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat, and a Voice beat,
More instant than the feet:
All things betray thee who betrayest me.
This powerful image of the flight of the soul from God helps to articulate the deeper notion of how the flight from suffering and thus from the Cross is in fact resistance to God Himself. Yet finally our end to resistance to God leads to an acceptance of Him so that we might in the end be healed. Thompson himself knew what suffering meant as he became addicted to laudanum and, after falling to qualify as a doctor he spent years homeless on the streets of London and, in the words of Wilfrid Meynell, his friend and rescuer, "knew Oxford Street for a stony-hearted stepmother".
He wrote many poems, including one of the earliest cricket poems celebrating two old Lancashire cricketers; "my Hornby and my Barlow long ago". A favourite, found amongst his effects after he died, is The Kingdom of God which, in a way, links with the idea of the hound of heaven as showing how heaven is in earth and God is in Man who in the end cannot escape His presence. Here are the closing lines:
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry--and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry--clinging to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!
There are still people like Francis Thompson under the railway arches at Charing Cross.
Anne and John Duddington