He’d hear an arrow whispering.’”
There is a great deal of the Indiana landscape to be found through Mr. Thompson’s poems, though he often looks southward to the north Georgia hills and to Florida. Servile descriptions he does not give, but against backgrounds traced with great delicacy and beauty he throws suddenly and for a moment only some fleeting spirit of the woodland. There is in his language “the continual slight novelty” which is indispensable in poetry that is to haunt and taunt the memory. As an instance of his felicity a poem called “Before Dawn” may be cited:—
“A keen, insistent hint of dawn
Fell from the mountain height;
A wan, uncertain gleam betrayed
The faltering of the night.
“The emphasis of silence made
The fog above the brook
Intensely pale; the trees took on
A haunted, haggard look.