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