The devil doesn't know how to sing, only how to howl.

Thompson attempted suicide in his nadir of despair but was saved from completing the action through a vision which he believed to be that of a youthful poet Thomas Chatterton who had committed suicide almost a century earlier. She soon disappeared however never to return. This poem is 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.

A married couple read his poetry and rescued him publishing his first book Poems in 1893. Francis Thompson (16 December 1859 – 13 November 1907) was an English poet and ascetic.