The Poems of Thomas Gordon Hake

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. In these selected poems, Thomas Gordon Hake speaks with a solemn, dreamlike intensity that Alice Meynell praises for its meditative power and distinctive voice. Grief, memory, and spiritual endurance thread through the collection, where loss never simply ends love but transforms it into a haunting, inward presence. Hake turns village life, myth, and sacred history into visions of compassion, judgment, and renewal. "Old Souls" offers a visionary allegory of a humble tinker crying, "Old souls to mend!" as he moves through every rank of society, exposing corruption, hypocrisy, and neglect. Ignored and mocked, he remains a Christ-like figure of mercy, patiently restoring what has grown rusted, worn, and broken. Other poems range from the radiant beauty of "Venus Urania" to the village pathos of "The Cripple," the mythic force of "The Infant Medusa," and the tender unfolding of "The Lily of the Valley," where innocence matures into sorrow, compassion, and service. The volume also includes meditations on blindness, a blind man's growing vision of Christ and the crucifixion, the fatal journey of a snake-charmer, and philosophical reflections on death, reincarnation, and the soul's long wait for resurrection. "The First Saved" closes in a luminous paradise, where suffering is transfigured into peace.