1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Francis Thompson

Francis Thompson Quotes

For others with this name, see Francis Thompson .Francis Thompson was an English poet and mystic. At the behest of his father, a doctor, he entered medical school at the age of 18, but at 26 left home to pursue his talent as a writer and poet. He spent three years on the streets of London, supporting himself with menial labour, becoming addicted to opium which he took to relieve a nervous problem.

In 1888 a married couple, publishers, read his poetry and took him into their home for a time. They were to publish his first book Poems in 1893. In 1897, he switched to writing prose, drawing inspiration from life in the countryside, Wales and Storrington. His health, always fragile, continued to deteriorate and he died of tuberculosis in 1907. By that time he had published three books of poetry, along with other works and essays. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. December 1859 – 13. November 1907
Francis Thompson photo

Works

The Hound of Heaven
The Hound of Heaven
Francis Thompson
Francis Thompson: 19   quotes 1   like

Famous Francis Thompson Quotes

“I said to Dawn: Be sudden—to Eve: Be soon.”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 2.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

“The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.”

Francis Thompson

St. 4.
The Kingdom of God http://www.bartleby.com/236/245.html (1913)

“Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars:
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o’ the moon.”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 2.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

“Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;
it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition that it be commuted into death.”

Francis Thompson

Shelley. In the Dublin Review (July 1908).

“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.”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 1.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

“Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.”

Francis Thompson

To My Godchild (this line is inscribed on Thompson's gravestone).

Francis Thompson Quotes

“Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan,
For we are born in other's pain,
And perish in our own.”

Francis Thompson

Daisy http://www.bartleby.com/103/26.html (1893), st. 15.

Pain

“But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbéd 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 The Hound of Heaven

St. 1.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

Speed

“In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years—
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 4.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

Life , Youth , Sun , Dead

“O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!”

Francis Thompson

St. 1.
The Kingdom of God http://www.bartleby.com/236/245.html (1913)

World

“Upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.”

Francis Thompson

St. 5.
The Kingdom of God http://www.bartleby.com/236/245.html (1913)

Loss

“All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 5.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

“The hills look over on the South,
And Southward dreams the sea;
And with the sea-breeze hand in hand,
Came innocence and she.”

Francis Thompson

Daisy http://www.bartleby.com/103/26.html (1893), st. 2.

Dreams , Sea

“Short arm needs man to reach to Heaven,
So ready is Heaven to stoop to him.”

Francis Thompson

Grace of the Way http://www.lib.utexas.edu/epoetry/thompson.q3c/thompson.q3c-96.html, st. 6.

“The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world.”

Francis Thompson

Sister Songs http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/ssngs10.txt, Pt. II (1908).

World

“The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.”

Francis Thompson

St. 3.
The Kingdom of God http://www.bartleby.com/236/245.html (1913)

“The fairest things have fleetest end,
Their scent survives their close:
But the rose's scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose.”

Francis Thompson

Daisy http://www.bartleby.com/103/26.html (1893), st. 10.

Love

“Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare;
And left the flushed print in a poppy there:
Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came,
And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame.”

Francis Thompson

The Poppy http://books.google.com/books?id=qM8VAAAAYAAJ&q="Summer+set+lip+to+earth's+bosom+bare+And+left+the+flushed+print+in+a+poppy+there+Like+a+yawn+of+fire+from+the+grass+it+came+And+the+fanning+wind+puffed+it+to+flapping+flame"&pg=PA6#v=onepage.

Grass , Summer

Similar authors

Robert Southey photo
Robert Southey 51
British poet
George Gordon Byron photo
George Gordon Byron 227
English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement
Charles Baudelaire photo
Charles Baudelaire 133
French poet
Mikhail Lermontov photo
Mikhail Lermontov 34
Russian writer, poet and painter
Aleksandr Pushkin photo
Aleksandr Pushkin 33
Russian poet
Henri-Frédéric Amiel photo
Henri-Frédéric Amiel 50
Swiss philosopher and poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 202
American poet
Robert Browning photo
Robert Browning 179
English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era
Léon Bloy photo
Léon Bloy 22
French writer, poet and essayist
Thomas Hardy photo
Thomas Hardy 171
English novelist and poet