em>am fleeing...
'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.'
Perhaps Francis Thompson sensed his life would be cut short. Unable to support himself as a young writer, he battled mental dissolution and addiction, was picked up off the street and sheltered for a time by a prostitute. After three years homeless on the streets of London, he was discovered by a literary magazine, and cared for while his health returned.
How many other geniuses have had equally poignant lives? Poe, Schumann, Coleridge, George Price, Steve Jobs... How many more whose genius was never 'discovered', and lived out lives of silent desperation to the end?
