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?