This blog comes courtesy of my father who recommended the poem “The Hound of Heaven” to me. It was written in 1890 by Francis Thompson, an English poet.
Just read it and have a few thoughts. I think this poem is an example of Naturalism, a literary movement popular at the turn of the 20th century. Wikipedia defines the movement in philosophy as “the idea or belief that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) operate in the universe.” But I think it is also spiritual in a way because it seems to represent rejection of the corporeal life.
It begins with the words “I fled Him,” referring to a hound that seems to represent man’s animal nature. The flight is done through “the labyrinthine ways” of the speaker’s mind. He avoids the hound because he is “sore adread/Lest adread, I must have naught beside.”
The poem also contains a bull (in the sense of an Irish bull) when it says, “Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.” It brings to mind Richard Head’s 17th-century remark in a preface to his book Nugae Venales that he plans “To speak with silence, and to write aloud.”
Towards the end of the poem, the hound says, “Alack, thou knowest not/How little worthy of any love thou art!” I think this poem is an intriguing combination of Naturalism, with its disbelief in spirituality and valorization of the animal qualities of the human, and a turn away from corporeal pursuits to a simpler type of existence, possibly a spiritual one. So it is an ambiguous poem to me. I think great poetry usually is ambiguous.