BEFORE
The Snare of the Fowler
Thwarted Utterance
The Song of Her
"Always I Know You Anew"
The Rival Celestial
The Tamer of Steeds
Love in Armor
Wardrobe of Remembrance
The Second Covenant
Dedication to a First Book
The Shadowed Road
Love in the Dawn
"Had I a Claim to Fame?"
The One
Dream and Deed
A Taper of Incense
To Purity
Atonement
The Adoration
Talisman
Recognition
The Silver Hind
Aristeas Relates His Youth
Man Possessed
Miniature
Death Will Make Clear
Sunlight
And a Long Way Off He Saw Fairyland
In Time of Trouble
Anomaly
The Lover
Judgment
Unforgotten
The Pale Dancer
Premonition
AFTER
Introductory Poem
The Long Absence
By the Counsel of Her Hands
Strength Beyond Strength
Que Sais-Je?
Ebb-Tide
Coward
Aquilifer
The Woman
Pervigilium
Time Was
The Masters
When
Children
The Retreat
Sealed
FOREWORD
TERESA FRANCES THOMPSON, who also bore my name by marriage, died on January 26, 1919. This verse is published to her memory, because I wish to keep together the poetry she occasioned and enable those who loved her—and they were a great many-to know definitely what she was to me.
I think that is the truth. This is the only means I have at present of acknowledging publicly the vast debt I owe to her.
As I turn these poems over—if they are even to be called poems—I realize that they can never begin to express what her personality was. The earliest ones were written by a boy who was in love, and the latest by a man who has suddenly stepped into the dark. Those between are fragments from the days when we were struggling along together at the everyday tasks and outside interests and dreams that possessed us. The war entered our lives to change them in September, 1917. The poem, "Man Possessed," was written within sound of her actual voice, the others all in absence from her at various times and in moods made strange by absence.
And yet this is all I have at present to give in her memory. But I hold by these because—though they are poor, freakish fragments as far as any real expression of her is concerned—they were made for her.
It is even harder to express in bald prose a personality that had so many sides, so many varying strengths, such inner sight and yet such a forthright splendid intelligence. I have tried once to round it into periods—and have destroyed the attempt. It is my hope that the sister to whom she was devoted with an attachment altogether unusual to most of us will write of her.
If I merely recount the outlines of her life, it loses her. To say that her girlhood was given up to an intense and whole-souled devotion to the life of Christ as taught by the Roman Catholic Church will not even trace the outlines of that great spiritual adventure. But there, in the word "adventure," is a dim ideograph of what she found in life. Every day was an adventure to her with the hope of accomplishing something over and above mere routine and the pursuit of pleasure. And she used to say to me that her life had simply been a series of experiments into which she had put her whole heart, and in which she had always failed. But, of course, she never failed.
She wrote me while I was stationed at Washington: