Aview on Francis Thompson’s - the Hound of Heaven

Abstract

The Hound of Heaven is the sweetest, deepest, strongest song ever written in the English tongue. Bookman adds it saying “the Hound of Heaven seems to us on the whole, the most wonderful lyric in the language”. It has the unique thing that makes for immortality. Patmore confirms his touch from hound of Heaven. G.H Chesterton says that Francis Thompson is the great poet and with him we lose greatest poetic energy since Browning. The great poetry of the Hound of Heaven transcended in itself and in its influence all conventions says Wilfrid Meynell. In many poems one reading suffices, and the mind is satisfied, for the whole depth is plummeted and all is revealed in a single view. It is not so with this poem. There is a depth that can be sounded, and deeper depths are still there. Burne-Jones cries out “since Gabriel’s blessed Damosel no mystical words have so touched me as the Hound of Heaven” .