Easy to be Complicated

The writer of the poems featured below, Francis Thompson, was reckoned to be a genius by those who read his works, yet lived by the river Thames as a homeless man most of his adult life. Living in England during the late 1800’s, Thompson earned money by selling matches and newspapers and would often submit poems or letters to the editor of his favorite paper. One editor wrote that, “A genius greater than Milton lives among us,” but the editor had no way to contact him, as Thompson never provided a return address.

Thompson applied three times to Oxford either to finish the medical degree he had started at Owens College, or to pursue his true passion of writing. Each time he was denied admission due to an opium addiction which he never fully overcame. Near the end of his life he befriended a prostitute who allowed him to live with her and with whom she shared her income. Sometime later this benefactor left, never to return, perhaps a victim of her profession.

Thompson eventually died of tuberculoses, as so many of his era did, but not before friends and admirers collected his works and saw them published. His poems were often themed around his pursuit of God or God’s pursuit of him, and from his works we have the phrases, “Many a splendored thing,” and, “with all deliberate speed,” added to our vernacular.

I never knew you Francis, but in me you may count one more admirer. I hope God found you before the end, and that you and I might meet one day at the hems of heaven.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

O world invisible we view thee
O world intangible we touch thee
O world unknowable we know thee
Inapprehensible we clutch thee

Does the fish soar to find the ocean
The eagle plunge to find the air
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there

Not where the wheeling systems darken
And our benumbed conceiving soars
The drift of pinions would we hearken
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors

The angels keep their ancient places
Turn but a stone and start a wing
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces
That miss the many-splendored thing

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

~ Francis Thompson

TO A SNOWFLAKE

What heart could have thought you
Past our devisal
O filigree petal
Fashioned so purely
Fragilely
Surely

From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal
Too costly for cost
Who hammered you
wrought you
from argentine vapor

God was MY shaper.
Passing surmisal
He hammered
He wrought me
From curled silver vapor
To lust of His mind

Thou could’st not have thought me
So purely
so palely
Tinily
surely
Mightily
frailly
Insculped and embossed
With His hammer of wind
And His graver of frost

~ Francis Thompson

There was a boy
A very strange, enchanted boy

They say he wandered very far
Very far

Over land and sea
A little shy, and sad of eye, but very wise was he

And then one day, one magic day
He passed my way

And while we spoke of many things
Fools and kings

This he said to me

The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return

~ Eden Ahbez

* Happy Valentine’s Day *

I don’t know that there’s anything worse
Than the loss of a dream

Children are dreams
Nations are dreams too

Faith is a dream
Always the last to go
Perhaps the saddest loss of all

~ Jayce Michael

I wanted to run
To duck
To act

But the body is a slow
Wet mechanism
Of muscle and bone
That creeped
Even as my mind flew

~ Spoken by Dave, as played by Chase Williamson
   in the film: John Dies at the End
   Written by Don Coscarelli and David Wong

Tumblr is so goofy sometimes. If I want to reblog someone’s poem I have to capture it as a quote in order to get the whole thing displayed. But then something happens to the formatting. What the hell tumblr?