The Hound of Heaven - Influence

Influence

• Thompson's poem was the inspiration for a series of 23 paintings by the American painter R. H. Ives Gammell (1893–1981). Titled, A Pictorial Sequence Painted by R. H. Ives Gammell Based on The Hound of Heaven, it is considered Gammell's magnum opus. Gammell began making plans to execute the pictorial sequence during World War II and completed the series in 1956. For his paintings, Gammell used symbols drawn from C. G. Jung, primitive and medieval cultures, and biblical and mythological sources, to give visual form to Thompson's poem. The Pictorial Sequence is currently housed at the Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, Washington, USA.

• Thompson's poem is also the source of the phrase, "with all deliberate speed," used by the Supreme Court in Brown II, the remedy phase of the famous decision on school desegregation.

• The Christian alternative rock band Daniel Amos wrote a song titled Hound of Heaven on their 1978 album Horrendous Disc that is based on the Thompson poem.

• "The Hound of Heaven" is the fifth chapter in Robert L. Short's 1965 book The Gospel According to Peanuts where he describes Snoopy as a "little Christ" carrying out "Christ's ambivalent work of humbling the exalted and exalting the humble."

• "The Hound of Heaven" was mentioned in the suicide note of George R. Price, a geneticist who pioneered the evolutionary theory of altruism and suicide (among other things), before becoming a committed Christian and giving away all his possessions to the poor.

• Paramhansa Yogananda, the Indian spiritual master, included "The Hound of Heaven" in one of his two albums, "Songs of My Heart".

• In A. J. Cronin's novel, A Pocketful of Rye, the protagonist Carroll reads the poem as a young man, forgets it, and suffers from a recurring nightmare that finally leads to his conversion.

• A short passage from the poem appears in chapter four of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

• Lines from the poem are recited between the discussion during the last scene in "The last enemy", which is 2nd episode of 3rd season of Inspector Morse