Francis Thompson
Nobody's listed Francis Thompson as a LJ interest except for me-- so I thought you might like to hear a bit about him. Thompson was a Catholic poet who lived at the end of the Victorian era. He struggled with depression and opium addiction for most of his life, and died while he was still fairly young.
His poem The Hound of Heaven gets quoted a good deal, and not without reason, but there's a lot of good stuff in his works that's worth reading as well as that-- his The Kingdom of God, for example, which marvellously brings the mundane and the miraculous into one place:
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.
The most beautiful of his works that I know is his Arab Love-song. My advice is to go somewhere peaceful and read it to yourself slowly, and aloud.
The hunchèd camels of the night
trouble the bright
and silver waters of the moon.
The Maiden of the Morn will soon
through heaven stray and sing,
star gathering.Now while the dark about our loves is strewn,
light of my dark,
blood of my heart, O come!
and night will catch her breath up, and be dumb.Leave thy father, leave thy mother and thy brother;
leave the black tents of thy tribe apart!
Am I not thy father and thy brother, and thy mother?
And thou-- what needest with thy tribe's black tents
who hast the red pavilion of my heart?