Tag Archives: Francis Thompson

Poetry, Religion

I read ‘In No Strange Land,’ by Francis Thompson

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My intention yesterday was not to post the Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen video. I was thinking that I had put up a reading of Francis Thompson’s ‘The Hound of Heaven’ not long ago, and I ought to do ‘In No Strange Land’ too. Because it’s a lovely poem of faith, possibly even better than the ‘Hound,’ but that’s an apples and oranges thing. (It also inspired the title of a hit movie and song of the 1950s.)

And there were several readings to choose from on YouTube. I sampled them, but they failed to please me. I have strong views on how this poem (which I memorized long ago and can still reel out) ought to be read.

Well, as they say, if you want something done right, you’ll have to do it yourself. And I have the technology.

Above, my reading of ‘In No Strange Land.’ Feel free to share it, if you like.

Poetry, Religion

‘The Hound of Heaven,’ read by Richard Burton

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This Friday night, instead of music, a poem. Actor Richard Burton (a lost soul, if there ever was one) reads one of the great English Christian poems, “The Hound of Heaven.” Francis Thompson (1859-1907), an impoverished Catholic poet who died young of tuberculosis, wrote this amazing ode to the relentless love of Christ, which was published in a collection in 1893.

There was a time — it doesn’t seem long ago, but it was — when I could recite this entire poem from memory. I still have big chunks of it in my head, and can recall the others when prompted.

I always recited it more slowly and meditatively than Burton, who reads it rapidly, in the tone of a fugitive, his pacing tight with dramatic tension.

Poetry, Religion

‘In No Strange Land’

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Francis Thompson
Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

On Ash Wednesday, a Lenten poem by Francis Thompson, who also wrote “The Hound of Heaven.” If you pay close attention, you’ll find the inspiration for a famous movie title.

In No Strange Land
“The Kingdom of God is Within You”

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 estranged 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 Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking upon the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

Authors, Poetry, Religion

N.D. Wilson on Adapting ‘The Hound of Heaven’ for Film

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Author N.D. Wilson has directed a short film of the Francis Thompson poem, “The Hound of Heaven.” Shadowlocked.com has part of an interview with Wilson on how everything came together.

So what’s it like adapting somebody else’s work as opposed to your own?

Well, honestly I’m far more comfortable adapting other people’s stuff than my own. And actually, in some ways, because I can be a stickler. I can be a stickler to try to stay true as I possibly can to their vision, when I’m adapting their stuff. But when I’m adapting my stuff, I don’t feel any loyalty at all to it. I feel complete and total authority to change whatever I want, whenever I want.

And so when I’m adapting C.S. Lewis or even trying to serve Francis Thompson, I felt like I could write an intro, like I could write an opening monologue for Propaganda, but I couldn’t bring myself to edit the poem. No matter how many people told me, “Well, surely you’re not going to do the whole poem”, it was like, “No, I’m gonna do the whole poem. I’m doing all of it.” Because I really wanted it to come through.

If I’m doing my own things, like I’m doing 100 Cupboards, I’m thinking, like, “Oh, wow, I can throw this part away, and do this other thing that I was going to have in the novel, and I needed to cut it for space, but now I can put it in. I can take things that ended up on the cutting room floor of my novel, and put them into the film.” And I feel completely at liberty to do that. And that’s dangerous.

Read more about the movie here.

“I fled him . . . in the mist of tears . . .

‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’”