Or may this treasure-galleon of my verse,
Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme,
Set with a towering press of fantasies,
Drop safely down the time,
Leaving mine isled self behind it far,
Soon to be sunken in the abysm of seas,
(As down the years the splendour voyages
From some long-ruined and night-submerged star).
The foregoing extracts impress one also with another noteworthy and very important quality of Thompson's verse—its remarkable metrical effects. Watts-Dunton rightly says that in addition to intellectual and emotional life, great poetry must have rhythmic life. Unless the rhythm of any metrical passage is so vivid, so natural, and so free that it seems as though it could live, if need were, by its rhythm alone, that passage, according to Watts-Dunton, has no right to exist as poetry. One sign by which one may know that poetry possesses rhythmic life is that passages of it will sing themselves in one's head for days after reading them. Arnold Bennett tells us that after reading Sister Songs he went about for days repeating such passages as:
The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world.
After reading Thompson first, I went about for days repeating over and over again passages from his poems, not for their meaning, for the meaning in many cases was not clear, but just for the sound and beat of them, such passages as:
On Ararat there grew a vine...
or
I am Daniel's mystic mountain...
Everyone knows Kipling's picture of sunrise in Mandalay:
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay.
This is commonplace beside Thompson's version of the same thought in The Mistress of Vision: