THE poet is important, present, manifest to the poet. His poetry is an
addition to his state, which yet is complete without it. The state of
poetry, the state of the poet, has superfluity escaping into song. It
is this superfluity that makes, not the poet, but the poetry-book. If
Thompson had only written of his experiences as a poet, he would have
written fine poetry; when he wrote of the poet's songs he made songs,
when he wrote of the poet's communings with God and Nature he made more
songs, and, to make songs, need never have written directly of God and
Nature. In one sense his descriptions of the poet's throes are out of
all proportion to their product. He tells you so often of his Song,
that it might be complained he had no time for singing. He will compose
a poem to show he is Muse-forsaken, or to establish the fact that his
lady is immortal only in his verse; it hardly matters whether he wrote
otherwise of her or not. He will tell you, with supremest diction, that
his poppy and he lie safe in leavèd rhyme. The great bulk of his poetry
is about his poetry--that is, you might read his three volumes and
think they were but prefaces to thirty-three. Really they are the index
not to forty-eight other volumes, but to the forty-eight years of the
poet's existence--to the Poet, that is.
"The more a man gives his life to poetry, the less poetry he writes,"
was Thompson's own experience.
This harping upon himself is notable. His preoccupation is poetry--and
the poet. It is not a matter of selfishness but of difference. _New
Poems_ meets with many objections on this score, for sharp distinctions
within the species are always resented. The presence of the man is
resented, and the presence of the poet, or prophet, is resented. But
that he has his own place in creation he knows well enough. Isaiah knew
it; and when one of his kind says--
This dread Theology alone
Is mine,
Most native and my own;
And ever with victorious toil
When I have made
Of the deific peaks dim escalade,
My soul with anguish and recoil
Doth like a city in an earthquake rock,
* * * * *
With deeper menace than for other men,
he is proclaiming a family egoism that can no more be "pooh-poohed"
than a racial pigment or tribal distinction, the stature of the pygmies
or the stripe of the zebra. The tribal segregation of the spirit is
distrusted, however, because it defies scientific classification. It
is known as madness, saintliness, obscurity, affectation, "nerves,"
mania, fanaticism, conceit, according to its symptoms in a Blake, or a
Jacopone da Todi; all its kinds are labelled, but it is never brought
to exact order. The variousness of degree in the poetic character is
a necessity of the case. The poet makes the difference because he
makes his own world, his own scope, his own experience. If he is one
of a tribe, he is always the head of it--a chief, like every other,
with a tent as large as the sky, as large as the horizon which his own
intellectual stature may command.
The poet is conscious of his status as the "maker"--the maker who
presumes upon the common advantage of being made in the likeness of
God, and gives point to the likeness. It is plainly stated by F. T. in
"Carmen Genesis" and in an unpublished note written in support of the
poem:--
Poet! still, still thou dost rehearse,
In the great _fiat_ of thy Verse,
Creation's primal plot;
And what thy Maker in the whole
Worked, little maker, in thy soul
Thou work'st, and men know not.
Thine intellect, a luminous voice,
Compulsive moved above the noise
Of thy still fluctuous sense;
And Song, a water-child like Earth,
Stands with feet sea-washed, a wild birth
Amid their subsidence.
And in prose repetition of the "Poet or Maker":--
"In the beginning, at the great mandate of light, the
sea suddenly disglutted the earth: and still in the
microcosm of the poetic, the _making_ mind, Creation
imitates her august and remembered origins. Still,
at the luminous compulsion of the poet's intellect,
from the subsidence of his fluctuant senses emerges
the express and founded consistence of the poem;
confessing, by manifold tokens, its twofold parentage,
quickened with intellectual light, and freshened with
the humidities of feeling. Of generations it shall
endure the spiritual treading and to generations afford
its fruits, a _terra firma_ which may scarce wear
out before the prototypal earth itself. This is the
function of the maker since God first imagined: though
poetry's Book of Genesis is yet unwritten which might
be written, and its Moses is desired and is late. An
art not unworthy the Seraphic Order and the handling of
Saints. For the poet is an Elias, that when he comes
makes all things new. It is a converse, alas, and
lamentable truth, that the false poet makes even new
things old."
Of the Poet's powers of Creation or Transfiguration Wordsworth held an
advanced estimate:--
"The objects of the poet's thoughts are everywhere;
though the eyes and senses of men are, it is true,
his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever
he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to
move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all
knowledge--it is immortal as the heart of man. If
the labours of the men of science should ever create
any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our
condition, and in the impressions which we habitually
receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at
present. . . . If the time should ever come when what is
now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall
be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and
blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid
the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus
produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household
of man."
Pride of poetry, when Francis was forgetful of pride of pain, crops
up in a hundred places; he writes, for instance, of Davidson's "The
Testament of an Empire Builder":--
"We still lament that here, as in the preceding
poems of the series, there is far too much metrical
dialectic, argument in verse, which is a thing
anti-poetic. Poetry should proclaim, poetry is
_dogmatic_; when it stoops to argue, it loses its
august privilege and becomes, at the best, a K.C. in
cloth of gold."
It was easily perceived he was not candidly and fully himself in common
conversation. He was as much shut within his repetitions as the last
little Chinese box is shut within a series of Chinese boxes. Lift all
the lids and you find emptiness in the last. Francis insisted on your
putting all the little boxes back again, fitting the right lid on each,
for, having made his point, he seldom failed to prove it backwards. Had
he been of another age and race, he would have had an hermitage and
been sought by those who wished instruction--the instruction that is
not seldom done in silence. But who was ready to listen to Francis's
silences in London? It is possible that if a child had sought him in
Kensington Gardens, as he sat oblivious of the sparrows and the leaves
and the nursemaids, and had asked for knowledge, revelation might have
followed. We know that in the study at Lymington Patmore came to the
conclusion that his visitor's prose was better than his poetry, his
talk better than his prose. The windows of that Lymington study were
thrown open to the ample airs of Heaven; in London lodgings the east
winds made the noise outside, and Thompson's talk about the weather
filled the air within. The Eastern must have communion, even the
communion of silence, before he lights the lamp of common knowledge;
Plato needed the magnetism of listeners and learners. Francis needed
none but the absent, perhaps the unborn, reader. The shares he issued
were all deferred shares.
And every stanza was an act of faith; every stanza a declaration
of good-will. It is optimism that compels the poet to give the
superfluity of his inner song to the world. He knows, perhaps against
all common-sense, that the world will some day be fit for it. He
launches the utmost treasures of his rare estate upon the nondescript
audience. The pessimist either ceases writing (what is the use?), or,
if he writes, cannot always be trusted to give his best to a posterity
he despises. But Francis gave out no secrets unless he had wrapt them
in poetry. He bore them secretly, and set them free only when he had
decked them in imagery. He was too busy making clothes against their
birth for other companionship. Also, he was shy of his own inability
to be communicative and shy of his own ardent emotions towards his
friends:--
"I know how it must tax you," he wrote to A. M., "to
endure me; for you are a friend, a mother; while I,
over and above these, am a lover--spiritual as light,
and unearthly as the love of one's angelic dreams, if
you will--but yet a lover; and even a seraph enamoured
must be a trying guardian angel to have to do with."
And again:--
"I am unhappy when I am out of your sight, but you,
of course, can have no such feeling in reference to
me. Now my sense of this inspires me with a continual
timidity about inflicting my society on you in any way,
unless you in some way signify a desire for it."
He inflicted his society on nobody. What he did inflict was the
unaccomplished proxy of himself. Of the manner of his detachment he
writes:--
"I do not know but, by myself, I live pretty well as
much in the past and future as in the present, which
seems a very little patch between the two. It has been
more or less a habit through life, and during the last
fifteen years, from the widened vantage of survey then
gained, it has come to dominate my mental outlook. So
that you might almost say, putting it hyperbolically,
I view all mundane happenings with the Fall for one
terminus and the Millennium for the other. If I want to
gauge the significance of a contemporary event of any
mark, I dump it down as near as I can, in its proximate
place between these boundaries. There it takes up very
little room."
His very backwardness was benevolent; his eye, often pre-occupied,
was never indifferent; neither careless nor trivial, it never sought
an easy exchange of confidences, nor made friends by suggestion of
either tact or intelligence. He was a man who, if he entered not into
much intercourse, did not stand aloof through contempt or active
disinclination, but for other friendlier reasons. He was a man to be
observed, not to observe; to be seen, not to see. Neither he nor his
room-mates would, as a rule, be at great pains to come together; but,
even if you held no talk with him, he was sufficiently interesting or
endearing to take your eye.
It was after an evening divided between silence and explanations
that, wondering how well he covered the fires of his imagination, one
went to the door to help with hat and coat. Some final repetition,
unblushingly proclaimed with "As I have said before," would still
longer delay his return to himself; but once he had begun to go down
the flights of steps in Granville Place, where we had taken a flat, he
would find himself face to face again with the realities of life that
he chose to keep private, and be loudly talking to himself in a style
more meaningful and threatening than any speech of his in company.
Then the hall door would be slammed; and still in the silent street,
past puzzled policemen, he would stride away in fierce agitation, but
less solitary than when he sat among us. But a certain sweetness went
with him; he did not need to talk to stimulate that grateful mood of
charity and peace that some know only when they can actually do works
of mercy with their tongues and eyes. His gentle eye proved that not
all his silent thoughts were troubled; and often his gaze would climb
to some invisible and fair peak of contemplation, resting there content
in silence. Sometimes he was obviously happy in small-talk and his
companionships, but that was when commonplaces were not used solely
as a shelter from the inconvenience of thoughts not commonplace. Even
his halfpenny paper, as he read it over in his tea-shop, was a root of
happiness. He was fair game for the journalist of Lower Grub Street.
Here is a random list of the things he cut from the _Daily Mail_:
"Maria Blume's Will," "Insurance of Domestic Servants," "Help for the
Householder," "_Mikado_ Airs on Japanese Warship--Amusing Scenes,"
"Freaks of Weather: Startling Changes of Temperature," "The Milk Peril,
What hinders Reform," and "Joy," a poem by Mr. Sturge Moore--with a
little more margin to it, and straighter scissors-work.