"The main function of poetry is to be a fruitful stimulus. That is, to minister to those qualities in us which are capable of increase. Otherwise, it is a sterile luxury. Nor should it be made to minister to qualities which are mischievous by much increase. Sought mainly to provoke waning emotion, it is a sterile luxury; sought mainly to stimulate crescent emotion a pernicious luxury."
In view of these various accounts of the poetic function one must ask: Were the sorrows necessary? were they real? One mistrusts the poet, to whom joy must necessarily often come in the affirmation of distress.
One may argue that Thompson must have been happy on the score of his poetry. As a poet, no doubt, he was; but not necessarily as a man. The two states did not overlap. He says in a letter to a friend that he did not realise that Sister Songs, so poor a thing, would give pleasure; whereas in verse he speaks of sending it exultingly.
His "I have no poetry," like the communicant's "I am unworthy," is but the prelude to the embrace. In the "To a Broom Branch at Twilight" (Merry England, November 1891), he declares that there are songs in the branches—
I and they are wild for clasping,
But you will not yield them me.
The thought that silence is the lair of sound was his own ample consolation for other unproductive periods: but now as he grew ill and really silent, he felt that silence could nurture only silence.
His pride faces his distress; they stare each other out of countenance. It is certain that he often joined in George Herbert's address to a Providence who has made man "the secretary of her praise," though "beasts fain would sing," and "trees be tuning on their native lute":—
Man is the world's high-priest; he doth present
The sacrifice for all; while they below
Unto the service mutter an assent
Such as springs use that fall, and winds that blow.
And against the many contrary passages of Francis's may also be set his on the poet's happiness:—
What bitterness was overpaid
By one full verse! world's love, world's pelf
I fillipped from me, and but prayed
Boon of my scantly yielded self.