Indian Summer Notebook by Henry Williamson

Author:Henry Williamson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-873507-43-8
Publisher: Henry Williamson

Eve no gentlier lays her cooling cheek

On the burning brow of the sick earth,

Sick with death, and sick with birth,

Aeon to aeon, in secular fever twirled,

Than thy shadow soothes this weak

And distempered being of mine.

In all I work, my hand includeth thine;

Thou rushest down in every stream

Whose passion frets my spirit’s deepening gorge;

Unhood’st mine eyas-heart, and fliest my dream;

Thou swing’st the hammers of my forge;

As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,

Moves all the labouring surges of the world.

Pierce where thou wilt the springing thought in me,

And there thy pictured countenance lies enfurled,

As in the cut fern lies the imaged tree.

This poor song that sings of thee,

This fragile song, is but a curled

Shell outgathered from thy sea,

And murmurous still of its nativity.

This tremendous music continues for page after page, to the glory of love and of life which has its being and all its transformations ‘under the fostering hand of the Creator’, to employ a phrase used by one in a book composed in prison during the last war, a work which for its divination and sanctity will one day surely be part of our heritage of literature.

Francis Thompson is a major poet, applauded in his life-time. In the words of his friend and host Wilfrid Meynell, who with his wife, the poet Alice Meynell, cared for him after his days and nights of dereliction in the streets of London, the work of this ‘aloof moth of a man’ has long suffered the fate of many other great poets, who ‘learn in suffering what they teach in song’. His poetry is still ‘mighty meat for little guests’. One living minor poet, not so long ago, reviewed a book on the poet’s life as ‘rags and rubbish’, particularly The Mistress of Vision which attempts to convey, and does convey, what another living poet, Mr. Robert Graves, calls the White Goddess.

Love is the dayspring of all true poetry, the major force of evolution. There is indeed, as William Blake perceived, a war between Heaven and Hell, of the social instinct which would create higher forms of consciousness despite chaos. The imagery of all poetry, as of all religions which strive to create harmony, is a vehicle of this greater love, which arose from within Wilfred Owen – a poet declared, foolishly, by another great poet, Yeats, to be not worth a corner for versifiers in any local newspaper. But even great poets do sometimes disprize their relatives. Did not Byron disesteem the poetry of Keats, until Shelley, the gentle creature, pointed out to Byron his error?

Those charred stumps of trees in High Wood, standing stark on the skyline of the Somme uplands, come to mind as one reads again Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, to pause, and live again a moment, tenuous and ‘unreal’ as his Mistress of Vision,

Ah! must –

Designer infinite! –

Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?

Essay in The Mistress of Vision, by Francis Thompson, with a commentary by the Reverend John O’Connor and a preface by Father Vincent McNabb, O.

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