Miss Thomas's Poems

THERE is an informal social pleasure known as “ talking it over.” When the debutante’s ball has ended, the guests have gone, and the lights are lowered, a few privileged familiars, who have assisted at the ceremony, sit down in a corner and enjoy the ball over again, in a mood not so critical as that which ruled when preparations were in process, nor so keen as when the hour’s gayety kept one on the qui vive, but in a mellower, more relaxed frame. It is in some such spirit that we take up again the volume which contains the first collection of Miss Thomas’s poems.¹ Ever since this writer’s verse began to appear in The Atlantic, nearly four years ago, we have watched with unfeigned interest the illustration of her expanding power. Now that a rarely graceful book holds the poems which have been seen on The Atlantic pages and elsewhere, we congratulate ourselves on the charming debut, and without too anxious a forecast of the poet’s future take pleasure in noting the varied signs of a genuine success.

It may be said of the verse here gathered that it invites to more than one reading, and this is a test of poetry far more searching than at first appears. A story, to engage us, must be new ; a poem must be old. We read new poems with some reluctance, as we hear new music with difficulty; but there are poems, as there are sonatas, which immediately take their place as something to be heard again. We encore the song, or the movement, not because we want to hear another of the same sort, but because we want to hear the very one we have just heard ; and we glance over the programme with satisfaction when we find that we have not to try any experiments with our ears.

Now Miss Thomas’s poems are of a kind which do not disclose all their beauty upon a first acquaintance. They are not riddles, which need to be read again in order to he understood, but they flower to the understanding as one watches them. The delicate fragrance is there, — that one perceives at the outset ; hut there is a subtlety of beauty which is not rudely to be torn from them, leaf by leaf. Indeed, there is a noticeable absence of what may he called quotable lines, or striking epithets. One remembers the whole poem, not some fragmentary felicity in it. We suspect the author learned this secret where she learned most of her wisdom, — from nature. She has listened until she has heard, not some solitary cry, some single bird, crushing the stillness with its wing, in Hake’s fine phrase, but that pervading note which lies at the base of nature’s harmony, of which stillness itself is a vocal chord. It is only now and then that poetry steps behind the veil and is alone with the goddess. It is Wordsworth’s undying gift to verse that he sometimes thus betrays the sight hidden from the common eye, the sound that the outward ear does not hear. His Stepping Westward is a fine example of this sudden arrest of a movement which one knows only by its arrest. In this volume of Miss Thomas’s there is a poem, Something Passes, which affects one in the same way. It is possible that the poet has herself mused in her mind on this theme. At any rate, her Patmos is a somewhat conscious expression of the truth that to him that hath shall be given, and he shall have more abundantly.

Along with this rare revelation of the recesses of nature there is more which discloses the meaning in simple and familiar forms. Here again one thinks of Wordsworth in such poems as those To a Daisy and To the Small Celandine ; only whereas there is pretty sure to creep in a reflection of the poet’s mood in Wordsworth, such importations of personal feeling are rarer in Miss Thomas. There is a reticence about her verse, even when it touches upon possible occasions of experience, which betokens a true reverence for her art. The Birch Tree is a good illustration of her happy power in reading what may be called the symbolism of nature. Of the same sort are Wild Honey, The Grasshopper, Moss, and Oak-Corn. In each of these, and in others, there lurks the conception of a resolution of forces into spiritual forms. The charming conceit of the young oaks breaking through Merlin’s slumbering power adds that personal element which the poet rightly feels is more akin to nature than when resident in stark humanity. The poem Nature is in some respects the sum of the poet’s philosophy on this theme, and very terse and resolute is the expression. Not even poets may please themselves with the notion that they have a more intimate personal relation with nature than ruder men.

It is perhaps through this exclusion of the modern subjective notion of nature, by which the world only reflects the mood of the man, that Miss Thomas, with her subtle sense of will, has taken refuge both in fairy life and in classic fable. It is impossible that nature, whose every breath is a sign of life, should be incapable of receiving and giving sympathy, and therefore are children of her own created for this only. It is to be said of Miss Thomas’s fairyland that she has discovered it; she has not invented it. The fairies brush lightly past as she sings of bee, or oak, or moss ; now and then she catches a fuller glimpse, and gives a detailed picture, as in The Elfin Knight; but the most perfect of all her poems in this strain is the one entitled

A LIGHT ROUND.

The words fall as featly as the trippings of fairies, and the art in the final stanza is flawless. One scarcely hears the movement at last. It is only to be likened to some diminuendo passage of violins.

The occasional appearance of themes drawn from Hellenic sources partially explains this attitude of Miss Thomas toward nature. She has read her Greek out-of-doors, and has followed the guidance of Greek art in her interpretation of nature. There has indeed been a reflex influence, for she has plainly made her native fields the haunts of dryads and naiads, and has not vainly sighed for some far-off Hymettus. A certain bookish air is given to her poetry by this admixture of Greek suggestion, but this impresses one only superficially. A closer observation shows so successful an interpenetration of fable and familiar nature that one is reminded in a measure of that frank use of Hellenic material which characterizes some of the Elizabethan writers, Ben Jonson being the most notable representative. The difference lies in the more complex and refined knowledge possible to a poet today who is steeped in antique learning, and also in the difference of the two ages. Miss Thomas has hinted at this in one of the most notable of her poems, The Reply of the Nineteenth Century to the Passionate Shepherd. Marlowe had sung to his oaten pipe,

His poem is a lovely peep into Arcadia. There is not a word in it which belongs to Greece alone; there is scarcely a word which is not English in its suggestion ; and yet the poem is penetrated by Hellenic air; it is the. Greece of a poet’s reconstruction. It is exquisitely artificial. Miss Thomas replies in words which are pathetic in their hopeless self-knowledge : —

This is the mood of the century, which vexes itself with riddles and is conscious of a more varied sensibility. It is only necessary to suspect that Marlowe was but playfully importunate, and straight-way our modern poet., voicing the century, becomes worthier in her honest pathos.

There is another strain sometimes to be heard in these poems, which one may attend, if disposed to fear a too cold and impersonal quality in Miss Thomas’s verse. It is found in such poems as Exiles, Omens, Life and Death, Across the World I Speak to Thee, — poems which are charged with feeling, not vague in expression, but based on dramatic experience which is only distantly hinted at. There are several poems which are distinctly dramatic in conception ; there are some, also, which suggest that high sense of honor which it is the part of poetry to keep pure and undying as a vestal flame.

It is not strange that, with all this subtlety of feeling and thought. Miss Thomas should direct, her poems occasionally at poetry itself. It. belongs to a nature which is not content with a merely objective portraiture of the world to ask seriously, AVIiat is this power in me that sends me thus to the heart of things ? There are poems in this volume which are born of solitude, — such solitude as the poet inevitably enters who is profoundly conscious of his vocation. Profoundly conscious, we say. Many a person is lightly conscious of poetic faculty, plays with the power, and by and by, it may be, discovers that the spring of poetry has dried away. But given a profound consciousness of poetic inspiration, and the nature thus endowed is driven into the wilderness by no external daimon, but by an inward spirit. It is the manifestation of this in some of the poems contained in the book before us which gives us high hope, that Miss Thomas, whatever mistakes she may make, will not be false to her vocation. Voices of the Way has an echo from the depths. Flotsam and Jetsam has the ring of poetic courage. The Refuge tells of a mind that rests not short of the genuine. Sing-in-the-Winter, an exquisite lyric, has the triumphant note which tells of a secret hidden from the multitude. Dew of Parnassus is strong with the suggestion of a test which the poet fears not to submit to. Occasion hints at the way one may answer one’s own restlessness born of ambition, and To Fame is a noble reflection upon the compensation which awaits the faithful poet. So much, then, of conscious strength goes with this beginner’s volume, so much of fine art, and so much of spontaneous melody that we cannot withhold our generous faith in a continuous gift of song. It may well be that with time will come such further subordination of bookish knowledge as will enrich the humane side of Miss Thomas’s verse, and that even the fine penetration of nature will pass into a broader vision and a profounder revelation of beauty.