intended to pursue a career in law, had decided to try his own luck as a full-time writer. So he contacted a cousin who found an inexpensive house for let on the northern coast of Norfolk in the village of Cley next the Sea. Neither Thompson nor Trower imagined at the time that their sojourn to Norfolk would be anything but temporary. But they were to remain there until Thompson’s death in 1975.
Given the course of Thompson’s literary fortunes from this point forward, and his eventual return to his Catholic faith in 1952, it has been tempting for some to conclude that he made some sort of conscious decision to become a recluse. This was not his intention. Travel to London, even by car, was a long and tiring journey, but right up until their move Thompson and Trower had continued to meet socially with the likes of T.S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly, Rose Macaulay, Laurie Lee, Roy Fuller, and many others, indicating the opposite of a desire for retreat. At the same time, it is also true that to some extent, they simply moved into a more settled phase of life together.
There were other signs, however subtle, that Thompson was settling into himself. The poems at the end of Lament for the Sleepwalker, for example, show a dramatic shift from self-preoccupation to a focus outside his immediate experience. Not only that, but there is also a clear move toward simplified diction and direct syntax. In the moving “Sonnets to My Father,” written after his father’s death in 1945, Thompson’s lines have gone from “baroque” to “austere”:
Ah, Captain, you died at peace, although a war
Broke your heart, as once before your son had.
The years like roses darken, die: so fade
The roses on your grave. How the dead are
Easily put by. How the incomparable dead
Are easily forgotten. How still the dead.
Similarly, in “This Life, This Death,” the speaker of the poem surveys the various fears and temptations that assail him in his loneliness, yet concludes:
This life, this death, to be met with everywhere,
I know now to be my good hope and not despair.
In “The Moment of the Rose,” a title that seems a deliberate reference to the line “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree / Are of equal duration” in Eliot’s Four Quartets, the poet can say:
The end of love is that the heart is still
As the rose no wind distresses, still as light
On the unmoved grass, or as the humming bird
Poised the pure moment by an act of will.
Knowing as he does now the experience of human friendship “my childhood promised me,” quietly acknowledged in the next stanza, the poet not only finds peace but also the capacity to act. The phrase “act of will” seems an almost unconscious borrowing from traditional Catholic theology. St. Augustine famously equated will with love: “Amor meus, pondus meum”—my love is my weight. When we will something, it is because we love it. Whether Thompson knew the quotation or not, there is also an echo here of Kierkegaard’s “purity of heart is to will one thing.”
The exact sequence of events that led to Thompson’s return to Catholic faith and practice is uncertain. From various accounts, including letters he wrote to others about it, it is clear that at some point he began to say the rosary again. He also purchased the contemporary translation of the Gospels by Monsignor Ronald Knox, himself a well-known convert to Catholicism.
In a letter written later in his life Thompson recalls being in London in the mid-1940s, needing to get from Grosvenor Square to Berkeley Square, when he decides to take something of a “short cut” through the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception, commonly known as Farm Street Church. There he witnesses an elderly priest rocking back and forth in the pulpit as he preaches to the congregation on the topic of love. As Thompson leaves the church he takes note of the priest’s name, should he ever need to contact one.
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