The hound of heaven

The Hound of Heaven is a poetic motif that recurs throughout Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, drawn from the poem of the same name by Francis Thompson. The phrase appears in a well-worn volume of poetry that the second Mrs de Winter finds in Maxim de Winter's car during their courtship in Monte Carlo. The book falls open automatically at the poem's famous lines: "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 midst of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter." The narrator, reading these words, feels like "someone peering through the keyhole of a locked door," sensing that the poem holds a key to Maxim's hidden torment. The poem's theme of a divine pursuer from whom one cannot escape becomes a metaphor for the way Rebecca's memory haunts Maxim and the narrator throughout the novel.

The Poem as a Window into Maxim's Psyche

The discovery of the poem occurs during a pivotal moment in the developing relationship between Maxim and the narrator. After a drive to a precipice where Maxim had once been with Rebecca, he gives the narrator the book of poems, telling her she can take it and read it if she likes. The volume is "well worn, well thumbed, falling open automatically at what must be a much-frequented page." The narrator immediately connects the poem's imagery of flight and pursuit to Maxim's behavior earlier that afternoon, when he had driven dangerously close to the edge of a two-thousand-foot drop. She thinks: "What hound of heaven had driven him to the high hills this afternoon?" The poem thus becomes a lens through which the narrator begins to understand that Maxim is not merely grieving but is fleeing from something—a past that he cannot outrun, a memory that pursues him like a divine hunter.

The Inscription and Its Revelation

The poem's significance deepens when the narrator opens the book to the title page and reads the dedication: "Max—from Rebecca. 17 May." The handwriting is "curious slanting," with a "tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters." A blob of ink mars the opposite page, as though the writer had shaken her pen in impatience. This inscription transforms the poem from a mere literary reference into a tangible link to Rebecca. The narrator realizes that the poem was a gift from Rebecca to Maxim, and that its theme of relentless pursuit may have been a private joke or a warning. The narrator's reaction is visceral: she shuts the book "with a snap" and hides it under her gloves, unable to face the implications of what she has discovered.

The Destruction of the Page

The narrator's anxiety about the poem culminates in a symbolic act of destruction. After Maxim proposes to her, she returns to her room and finds the book of poems beside her bed. Tempted by a "demon," she opens it to the title page and, using her nail scissors, cuts the page bearing Rebecca's inscription out of the book. She tears the page into fragments and sets fire to them in a waste-paper basket, watching as "the letter R was the last to go, it twisted in the flame, it curled outwards for a moment, becoming larger than ever. Then it crumpled too; the flame destroyed it." This act of burning is an attempt to erase Rebecca's presence from her new life, to destroy the evidence of a past that threatens her marriage. Yet the very violence of the act reveals how deeply the memory of Rebecca already controls her.

The Hound as a Structural Motif

The Hound of Heaven motif extends beyond the single poem to become a structural principle of the novel. The narrator herself is pursued by Rebecca's memory, which she encounters in every room of Manderley—in the morning-room where Rebecca's handwriting still labels the pigeonholes, in the west wing where her clothes remain untouched, in the handkerchief left in a mackintosh pocket, and in the very scent of azaleas that pervades the Happy Valley. The narrator's attempts to escape this haunting are as futile as Maxim's. The poem's lines about fleeing "down the nights and down the days" echo the novel's own temporal structure, which moves backward and forward between the present exile and the past at Manderley, suggesting that memory itself is a hound that cannot be outrun. The motif culminates in Maxim's confession that he killed Rebecca, revealing that the "hound" he had been fleeing was not grief but guilt—and that Rebecca, even in death, had engineered her own pursuit, laughing as she died because she knew she would "win in the end."