Poems

A lover can make a ghostly beloved rise from a discarded glove; Francis Thompson finds his own spell in the vanished youth preserved by a woman’s portrait.

Written in the late Victorian era, these poems move between the intimate world of remembered faces and the vastness of the divine. Their speakers love fiercely, mourn what time carries off, and strain toward a faith that can feel like both refuge and pursuit. Thompson’s lavish images make a bird’s flight, a beloved’s gaze or a fading season feel charged with more than itself. In “The Hound of Heaven,” what happens when the soul can no longer outrun the presence that follows it?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.