I follow my law and fulfil it all duly—and look! when your doubt runneth high—
North points the needle!
These lines illustrate Miss Thomas’ command of accurately descriptive phrase: the compass is “mobile and frail as a tremulous spheret of dew,” and touched never so lightly, “how it drifts, and trembles, and searches on every side.” One feels that just these words, and no others, convey at once the sense of its delicacy, and the almost sentient instinct by which it seeks its attraction. Miss Thomas’ diction in general shows rather fineness of discrimination in the expressive value of words than a strenuous attempt to seek out those which are “literary” and inobvious. There is rarely a word that calls undue attention to itself; but when a passage or poem is analyzed, one cannot but note the fine sense of values in its phraseology. Her diction has elegance without conventionality, but one would scarcely say that it is highly temperamental. It is flexible, colorful, picturesque, but has not so strong a note of personality
that one meeting a poem of Miss Thomas’ by chance would be able to identify it by its evidence of word and phrase, as one may often do in the work of a poet. Miss Thomas’ marked individuality is rather in the essence of her work, its motive, mood, and thought, than in its distinctive style, which is too varied to be recognized by its touch.
Now and again in her earlier work the influence of Emerson comes out unmistakably. “A Reed Shaken With the Wind,” “Child and Poet,” and “The Naturalist,” are distinctly Emersonian in manner and atmosphere—the first especially so in its consecutive, unstanzaed lines, and in the note pervading it. Whatever mannerisms of style Miss Thomas acquired from Emerson were, however, quickly cast off; but with his thought she could scarcely fail to have a continued kinship, if not a debt, so much does her own work incline to the spiritually philosophical. One may not trace influences at all definitely in her work, though felt in its general enrichment and breadth. In “Palingenesis,” from her last collection, she has done what poets before her have done,—embody in song the theory of evolution; but it has rarely been done better than in these stanzas, which seize the spiritual side of the scientific
fact and fuse it with the imagination. It has been shudderingly foreboded that in this baldly practical age the poet would come singing of science; but if he invest it with the life and charm that pervade Miss Thomas’ incursion into the realm, there is no immediate cause for alarm. Indeed, a scientific truth, seen through the lens of a poet’s imagination, often takes on a beauty that no conception of fancy could duplicate, witness Whitman’s line:
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
from a poem upon the same theme which inspires Miss Thomas’ stanzas:
I dwelt with the God, ere He fashioned the worlds with their heart of fire,
Ere the vales sank down at His voice or He spake to the mountains, “Aspire!”