But although Miss Thomas has not the outward art of the dramatist, she has, as earlier stated, a keenly intuitive sense of the spiritually dramatic in passing life. Upon love she has written with so keen a psychology that certain
of the poems probe to the quick of that source of pain; for it is not the lighter phase, already so well celebrated, that she sings, but oftener the fateful, the inexplicable. For illustration, the poem, “They Said,” presents the caprice of love by which (they say), it goes to those who hold it most lightly, spend it most prodigally, flee it to entice it, and yet weave snares to detain it. The thrust of these stanzas is as delicately keen as a rapier point:
Because thy prayer hath never fed
Dark Atë with the food she craves;
Because thou dost not hate (they said),
Nor joy to step on foemen’s graves;
Because thou canst not hate, as we,
How poor a creature thou must be,
Thy veins as pale as ours are red!
Go to! Love loves thee not (they said).