Last week’s column ended with Francis Thompson’s agonized question, ” Does God care?” he wondered. We can identify with his desperate feelings, as he fears the condemnation he knows he deserves.
Holding at least a belief in a Creator Who has designed it all, the poet voices, and questions, that minimal faith:
Ah! is Thy love indeed
A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?
Ah! must—
Designer Infinite!—
Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou can’st limn with it?
My freshness spent its wavering shower i’ the dust;
And now my heart is as a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
Such is; what is to be?
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Here, thoroughly chastened, the poet, in the midst of this verse of abject grief and disillusionment, experiences, is surprised by, the inbreaking of the Holy Spirit:
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity;
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.
But not ere Him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound
With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
(And here a most fearful question arises.)
His name I know, and what His trumpet saith.
Whether man’s heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields
Be dunged with rotten death?
Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at last the bruit,
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
‘And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
The poem’s concluding verses are the heart of Thompson’s vision and genius; they express the rock-hard faith of his Catholic mysticism. He refuses to soften his vision of humankind’s piteous worthlessness, our ignoble state, our chosen lostness, and unyielding degradation of heart, mind, body, and soul. And he confesses it as his. Like the converted slave trader become preacher, John Newton, Thompson sees our fallen wretchedness in all its stark nakedness, and our absolute need of God’s grace to “save a wretch like me,” in Newton’s timeless words.
Hearing his deserved judgment in the Voice which has followed him, he writes:
Strange, piteous, futile thing!
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught’ (He said),
‘And human love needs human meriting;
How hast thou merited—
Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
I must insert here my comment that today’s self-esteem gurus might learn a thing or two from this eye-opener of a poem about just how inherently esteem-worthy we are not. Why would there have been the need for the costly grace of our Lord’s Sacrifice on the Cross if our fallenness had not disfigured God’s image in us? As the poet emphasizes, “…thou knowest not how little worthy of any love thou art!”. Our humanist ears may be shocked to read those words, but the biblical writers wrote them first, and more strongly than the poet’s.
Grace abounds. The poem’s final words are words of boundless hope, and our only true joy, the promise of the Saviour:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!’
Halts by me that footfall;
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’
The poet’s fearful question is answered. The One “…who summoneth…enwound With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned,” does not harvest the dead, but the living; those to whom He gives grace unmerited and love everlasting are His eternal, living harvest.
Thanks be to God.
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