Poetry Day - The Hound of Heaven

I am a little aghast that The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson, has never featured on this blog, though I did post a segment of it one year it seems when I took on Valentine's Day. (This is my poem to myself for that wretched day.) I do get a little perturbed by much of the writing directed at women these days, perhaps arising from this 'you are God's Princess' notion and the current obsession with our self-esteem, that you deserve this and deserve that and a guy must be this and that and the other for you or he should be spurned, because you deserve better ... (I mean, don't hear me wrong, there are ways to treat other human beings, as made in the image of God, and if a person can't be decent and respectful then one oughtn't trust oneself to them, but, I don't think I deserve to be treated like the Queen of Sheba.)

So, here is the final stanza of The Hound of Heaven, as something of a corrective to that, and yet about God's hard pursuit of each of us, not because we're inherently worth it, but because he's God, and yet he cares. I have had the portion in italics up on my wall for years, which I take in a slightly different context, as I don't think I have been fleeing from God in the manner of the character in the poem, but to me it is a reminder of where the greatest love is to be found (you can read the entire poem here):

The Hound of Heaven

Now of that long pursuit     Comes on at hand the bruit;   That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:     ‘And is thy earth so marred,     Shattered in shard on shard?   Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!   Strange, piteous, futile thing! Wherefore should any set thee love apart? Seeing none but I makes much of naught’ (He said), ‘And human love needs human meriting:   How hast thou merited— Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?   Alack, thou knowest not How little worthy of any love thou art! Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,   Save Me, save only Me? All which I took from thee I did but take,   Not for thy harms, But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.   All which thy child’s mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:   Rise, clasp My hand, and come!’   Halts by me that footfall:   Is my gloom, after all, Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?   ‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,   I am He Whom thou seekest! Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’ Francis Thompson