Chapter II

In Francis Thompson's first volume of poems, I pointed out some of the sources of the so-called originality of all that highly colored verse--Crashaw, Shelley, Donne, Marvell, Patmore, Rossetti--and I expressed a doubt whether a writer who could allow himself to be so singularly influenced by such singularly different writers could be really, in the full sense of the term, a new poet. The book before me confirms my doubt. Thompson is careful to inform his readers that "this poem, though new in the sense of being now for the first time printed, was written some four years ago, about the same date as the _Hound of Heaven_ in my former volume." Still, as he takes the responsibility of printing it, and of issuing it by itself, it may reasonably be assumed that he has written nothing since which he considers to be of higher quality.

The book consists of one long and obscure rhapsody in two parts. Why it should ever begin, or end, or be thus divided, is not obvious, nor, indeed, is the separate significance of most of the separate pages. It begins in a lilt of this kind:--

The leaves dance, the leaves sing, The leaves dance in the breath of Spring. I bid them dance, I bid them sing, For the limpid glance Of my ladyling; For the gift to the Spring of a dewier spring, For God's good grace of this ladyling!

But the rhythm soon becomes graver, the lines charged with a more heavily consonnated burden of sound, as, for instance, in the opening of the second part:--

And now, thou elder nursling of the nest, Ere all the intertangled west Be one magnificence Of multitudinous blossoms that o'er-run The flaming brazen bowl o' the burnished sun Which they do flower from How shall I 'stablish _thy_ memorial?

"I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech," the writer adds, with more immediate and far-reaching truth than he intends. Thompson wilfully refuses to speak his fellows' speech, in order to speak a polysyllabic speech, made up out of all the periods of the English language--a speech which no one, certainly, has employed in just such a manner before, but which, all the same, does not become really individual. It remains, rather, a patchwork garb, flaming in all the colors, tricked out with barbaric jewels, and, for all its emphatic splendor, suggesting the second-hand dealer's.

In such a poem as _The Hound of Heaven_, in Thompson's former volume, there was a certain substratum of fine meaning, not obscured, or at all events not concealed, by a cloud of stormy words. But here I find no sufficing undercurrent of thought, passion, or reverie, nothing but fine fragments, splendid lines, glowing images. And of such fragments, however brilliant in themselves, no fine poetry can consist. Thompson declares of himself and his verse, with a really fervid sense of his own ardor:

And are its plumes a burning bright array? They burn for an unincarnated eye. A bubble, charioteered by the inward breath Which, ardorous for its own invisible lure, Urges me glittering to aerial death, I am rapt towards that bodiless paramour; Blindly the uncomprehended tyranny Obeying of my heart's impetuous might.

Scarcely could a single line express more concisely and more significantly the truth about Thompson than one of these lines. "Urges me glittering to aerial death:" how true that is in its confession of that fatal vagueness of aim, showiness of equipment and the toppling disaster of it all! Thompson has miscalculated his strength of flight. He is for ever straining after the heights, and there are moments when he seems to have reached them. But it is only that he has dazzled and confused our sight by the trick of some unfamiliar magic. And his magic, for the most part, is a magic of words. Those suggestions of a rare poetic vision, which, from the first, seemed nebulous rather than illuminated, have become little more than verbal sophistries. To have transposed a phrase until it becomes

To Naiad it through the unfrothing air

satisfies him as though it had been a vision or an invention. The frigid conceit of

The blushes on existence's pale face

satisfies him as though it were an imaginative conception. And such combinations of words as

The very hues Which their conflagrant elements effuse

satisfy him as being effects of appropriate poetic novelty. The _Poems_, with all their faults, had suggestions of finer possibilities. In _Sister-Songs_ none of these possibilities is realized. At the most it is a sort of fantastic world of waters (shall we say, at Thompson's suggestion?) where,

----like the phantasms of a poet pale, The exquisite marvels sail: Clarified silver; greens and azures frail As if the colours sighed themselves away, And blent in supersubtile interplay As if they swooned into each other's arms; Repured vermilion, Like ear-tips 'gainst the sun; And beings that, under night's swart pinion, Make every wave upon the harbour bars A beaten yolk of stars. But where day's glance turns baffled from the deeps, Die out those lovely swarms; And in the immense profound no creature glides or creeps.

Francis Thompson's earlier volume of _Poems_ attracted perhaps an undue amount of attention on account of its gorgeous and unusual qualities of diction, and a certain exuberant and extravagant fervor of mood. These are not indeed the characteristics of the highest kind of poetry, but they are characteristics which impress uncritical persons as being of the essence of poetic inspiration. To express a small thought by a large word is always impressive, and a certain excitement in the manner of it adds greatly to the effect of the performance. Thus, much writing which is merely feverish and blustering becomes admired for the quality of its defects, these defects being taken to be extraordinary merits; while writing which has all the quietness of true perfection passes unobserved or unrecognized. In particular it is forgotten that the expression of a thought should be like a well-fitting suit of clothes, following closely and gracefully the outlines of the body that informs it. Francis Thompson, alike in his former work and in the work which he has just brought out, is never content unless his thought is swathed in fold after fold of variegated drapery, cut after no recognized fashion and arranged on no consistent or indeed comprehensible plan. Take this passage, for instance, on page three of _Sister-Songs_:

Now therefore, thou who bring'st the year to birth, Who guid'st the bare and dabbled feet of May; Sweet stem to that rose Christ, who from the earth Suck'st our poor prayers, conveying them to Him; Be aidant, tender Lady, to my lay! Of thy two maidens somewhat must I say, Ere shadowy twilight lashes, drooping, dim Day's dreamy eyes from us; Ere eve has struck and furled The beamy-textured tent transpicuous, Of webbed coerule wrought and woven calms, Whence has paced forth the lambent-footed sun.

This is a fair, indeed a favorable, specimen of Thompson's way of "Making familiar things seem strange." His vocabulary is for the most part made up of an ingenious, and really novel, selection from the words that other people are ignorant of, or perhaps avoid if they know them: "battailously," for instance, or "illuminate and volute redundance," which will be found on a single page. He describes himself as a

Wantoner between the yet untreacherous claws Of newly-whelped existence;

while on another page he tells us:

The hours I tread ooze memories of thee, sweet!

He sees "blossoms mince it on river swells," and notices when

All the fair Frequence swayed in irised wavers.

All this is surely a very artificial and unnecessary and inelegant way of expressing very ordinary matters. The same strain after a sort of exterior heightening of expression appears on every page. Often the language has a certain magnificence, and it is always employed in the service of a luxurious fancy, which not infrequently rises to the point of sheer imagination. But the whole book leaves no enduring impression on the mind, only the visual memory of flooding words, splashing in colored waves. As a piece of decoration, in this highly colored kind, it has qualities of extraordinary brilliance and audacity. And at times, becoming for a moment a little simpler than its wont, though still fantastic and freakish, it will present us with an effect like that in the following lines:

And thou, bright girl, not long shalt thou repeat Idly the music from thy mother caught; Not vainly has she wrought, Not vainly from the cloudward-jetting turret Of her aerial mind, for thy weak feet, Let down the silken ladder of her thought. She bare thee with a double pain, Of the body and the spirit; Thou thy fleshly weeds hast ta'en, Thy diviner weeds inherit!

The precious streams which through thy young lips roll Shall leave their lovely delta in thy soul. Where sprites of so essential kind Set their paces, Surely they shall leave behind The green traces Of their sportance in the mind; And thou shalt, ere we well may know it, Turn that daintiness, a poet,-- Elfin-ring Where sweet fancies foot and sing.

Such work as this comes strangely enough into the midst of contemporary verse, concerned as that for the most part is with other ends, and elaborated after quite another fashion. Always interesting, if never quite satisfying; too crowded, too loaded, rather than, as with most verse, meager and unfilled; curiously conceived, and still more curiously wrought out; it holds a unique position in the poetic literature of the day, if not, in Patmore's words concerning the earlier volume of _Poems_, "in the prominent ranks of fame, with Cowley and Crashaw." It is a book which no one else could have written, and in which no one can fail to admire, with however many reservations, the "illuminate and volute redundance" of an only too opulent talent.

For it is difficult to avoid the conviction that Thompson deliberately rejects simplicity, and even, at times, with an elaborate and conscious search after long and heavily colored words. There is in this book a translation of Victor Hugo's _Ce qu'on entend sur la Montagne_, a well known poem in the _Feuilles d'Automne._ In going carefully over Thompson's version and comparing it word for word with the original, we have found that where Victor Hugo--not a simple writer--is simple, Thompson embroiders upon him, and that where he is not simple, Thompson is always less so. For instance, in the very first couplet we have "let your tread aspirant rise" for _monté_; a few lines below,

One day at least, whereon my thought, enlicensed to muse, Had drooped its wing above the beached margent of the ooze,

for

----_un jour q'en rêve Ma pensée abattit son vol sur une grève._

Further on,

The one was of the waters; a be-radiant hymnal speech!

for

_L'une venait des mers; chant de gloire; hymne heureux!_

And finally,

And I made question of me, to what issues are we here, Whither should tend the thwarting threads of all this ravelled gear,

in place of

_Et je me demandai pourquoi l'on est ici, Quel peut être après tout le but de tout ceci._

What could be more significant than this heaping up of long and extravagant and sometimes feeble words, instead of the direct language of Hugo, who in this poem, though not without a certain rhetoric, says exactly what he wants to say, and when, as in the last two lines quoted, he thinks that an almost bald simplicity will be in place, sets down his thoughts in terms of an almost bald simplicity? In this translation, Thompson has betrayed himself; he has allowed his critics to see him at work, substituting what is roundabout for what is straight-forward; what is lengthy for what is brief; what is elaborated for what is simple. Has not a similar process gone on in his own mind--how far consciously one can not tell--during the writing of his original poems?