I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

These lines open Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven,” a religious lyric dramatizing a soul’s flight from God and God’s relentless pursuit. Thompson (1859–1907), an English Catholic poet, wrote the poem in the late 1880s after years marked by poverty, illness, and opium addiction, and it was first published in 1890. The poem’s speaker recounts trying to evade divine love through time (“nights…days…years”), through inner psychological complexity (“labyrinthine ways / Of my own mind”), and through emotional disguises (“mist of tears…running laughter”). The work became Thompson’s best-known poem and a touchstone of modern Christian devotional literature.

The passage frames spiritual resistance as both temporal and psychological: the speaker runs through time and memory (“arches of the years”) and through the convolutions of consciousness (“labyrinthine ways”). Tears and laughter function as opposite masks—sorrow and distraction—used to hide from an inescapable presence. The repeated “I fled Him” conveys panic and obsession, while the capitalized “Him” signals the divine pursuer. Thompson’s central paradox is that the pursuit is not punitive but loving: the “Hound” image suggests inevitability and endurance, implying that grace can outlast self-deception and self-estrangement. The lines thus introduce a drama of conversion in which flight becomes the prelude to surrender.