{"id":73401,"date":"2014-07-01T16:19:17","date_gmt":"2014-07-01T20:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=73401"},"modified":"2014-07-02T18:26:51","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T22:26:51","slug":"brazen-towers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/01\/brazen-towers\/","title":{"rendered":"Brazen Towers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Francis_Thompson_at_19\"<\/a>

Francis Thompson at nineteen. Via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThe Summer looks out from her brazen tower,
Through the flashing bars of July.\u201d
\u2014Francis Thompson, \u201cA Corymbus for Autumn\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By the time he died of tuberculosis in 1907, the forty-seven-year-old Francis Thompson had found respect and moderate success as a poet. A favorite of G. K. Chesterton, and later both J. R. R. Tolkien and Madeleine L\u2019Engle, Thompson gave us the phrases \u201cwith all deliberate speed\u201d and \u201clove is a many-splendored thing,\u201d which would become the title of a 1952 novel, a ludicrous film, a hit song, and, later, a soap opera. The latter is especially apt; Thompson had a dramatic and difficult life.<\/p>\n

The son of a Lancashire physician, Thompson studied medicine himself, but in 1885 moved to London to try to make it as a writer. Instead, he developed a serious opium addiction and started sleeping rough on the streets of Charing Cross, occasionally selling matches and newspapers to make a little money. He would claim later that, on the brink of suicide, he was saved from ending it by a vision of the poet Thomas Chatterton. More materially, he was, he said, helped by an anonymous prostitute, who gave him money and lodging before conveniently disappearing, Thompson would say, because, in classic hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold fashion, he feared that associating with her would hurt his burgeoning career. (Needless to say, he would go on to write about her romantically in many poems.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what we know for sure: after reading a manuscript Thompson had sent them, the editors Wilfrid and Alice Meynell took him in, ran his work, and would later help him publish a book. (It probably didn\u2019t hurt that Thompson had been raised Anglo-Catholic; the Meynells were active in Oxford Movement circles.) The Meynells even paid for Thompson to do a stint in Our Lady of England Priory, a sort of Victorian rehab.<\/p>\n

Of course, by then years of neglect and addiction had taken their toll. Thompson was never physically robust, and died after years of illness. In a final act he might have appreciated, his onetime home, which bore a Blue Plaque, came to an appropriately depressing end: in March of this year, an engineer accidentally hit the house with a cherry picker, and it proceeded to promptly collapse. (Watch the video here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Summer looks out from her brazen tower, Through the flashing bars of July.\u201d\u2014Francis Thompson, \u201cA Corymbus for Autumn\u201d By the time he died of tuberculosis in 1907, the forty-seven-year-old Francis Thompson had found respect and moderate success as a poet. A favorite of G. K. Chesterton, and later both J. R. R. Tolkien and Madeleine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[4846,14477,14478,12985,2047,9791],"class_list":["post-73401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-britain","tag-francis-thompson","tag-hookers","tag-nineteenth-century","tag-poets","tag-tuberculosis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Dramatic and Difficult Life of Francis Thompson<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u201cThe Summer looks out from her brazen tower, \/ Through the flashing bars of July.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/01\/brazen-towers\/\" \/>\n<meta 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