The second volume, published in 1895, consisted of one long poem in two parts, Sister Songs, addressed to the sisters Monica and Madeline Meynell. The first part seems to me to be spoiled by over-luxuriance, but the second is grand poetry. One short quotation must suffice:
Eve no gentlier lays her cooling cheek
On the burning brow of the sick earth,
Sick with death, and sick with birth,
Aeon to aeon, in secular fever twirled,
Than thy shadow soothes this weak
And distempered being of mine.
In all I work, my hand includeth thine;
Thou rushest down in every stream
Whose passion frets my spirit's deepening gorge;
Unhood'st mine eyas-heart, and fliest my dream;
Thou swing'st the hammers of my forge!
As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world.
Pierce where thou wilt the springing thought in me
And there thy pictured countenance lies enfurled,
As in the cut fern lies the imaged tree.
This poor song that sings of thee,
This fragile song, is but a curled
Shell outgathered from thy sea,
And murmurous still of its nativity.
Thompson's third and last volume was published in 1897, under the title New Poems. This volume contains some of his longest and most elaborate compositions. Like many of the poems in Volume One outside those already noticed, the most important poems of Volume Three are expressions of Thompson's religious mysticism, and with this is combined a free use of symbolism derived from the Hebrew Prophets and the Eastern mythologies. Although no one can fail to recognize the splendour of the poetry in this third volume, a full appreciation of it requires a somewhat special equipment. "The main region of Mr. Thompson's poetry," says Patmore, "is the inexhaustible and hitherto almost unworked mine of Catholic philosophy." To one not specially versed in that philosophy, an attempt to give an appreciation of the poems is a dangerous task, and one full of pitfalls.
Suffice it to say that Thompson's mysticism is not an apparently aimless plunging about in the darkness of the void like that of Maeterlinck and other modern mystics. Thompson's mysticism was kept within bounds and given a definite direction by common sense and the authority of the Church. "Dante," he said, "is a perfect rebuke to those who believe that a mystical genius must be dissociated from common sense. Every such poet should be able to give a clear and logical prose résumé of his teaching as terse as a page of scholastic philosophy." And so we find that the rule of Thompson's practice is summed up in the words, "To the Poet life is full of visions, to the Mystic it is one vision." Having regarded the visions as a poet, and set them down as a mystic, he would call them one. The one great vision enfolded and explained them all. Such is the explanation of his poems, The Orient Ode, The Anthem of Earth, and The Ode to the Setting Sun.
To treat Thompson fairly one should give his deeper poems careful study, but Thompson does not always write of deep and doubtful things. More often indeed his faith is as the faith of a little child. We are told on high authority that we must become as little children if we are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It was as a little child that Thompson sought to enter there, and it is among the children of Heaven that Thompson would take his place.
To his godchild he writes:
And when, immortal mortal, droops your head,
And you, the child of deathless song, are dead;
Then, as you search with unaccustomed glance
The ranks of Paradise for my countenance,
Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod
Among the bearded counsellors of God;
For if in Eden as on earth are we,
I sure shall keep a younger company:
Pass where beneath their rangéd gonfalons
The starry cohorts shake their shielded suns,
The dreadful mass of their enridgèd spears;
Pass where majestical the eternal peers,
The stately choice of the great Saintdom, meet—
A silvern segregation, globed complete
In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet;
Pass by where wait, young poet-wayfarer,
Your cousined clusters, emulous to share
With you the roseal lightnings burning 'mid their hair;
Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads seven:—
Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.
MILTON
AN UNDERGRADUATE POEM