Francis Thompson is remembered today almost solely for his great allegorical poem of God’s pursuit of an individual soul, ‘The Hound of Heaven’. Its opening lines are as follows:
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. The poet was educated for the Roman Catholic priesthood, switched to medicine and, failing at that, moved to London where he became a vagrant and opium addict. He was rescued by Wilfred and Alice Meynell, who cared for him ‘the rest of his short life and to whom his first volume, Poems, was dedicated in 1893 (in which ‘The Hound of Heaven’ appears). His second collection, Sister Songs, was published in 1895.