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.