One of the specially short poems sees the universe overthrown
and the good angels conquered. Another short poem sees the newsboys in
Fleet Street shouting the news of the end of the world, and the awful
return of God. The writers seem unconsciously to have sought to make a
poem as large as a revelation, while it was nearly as short as a riddle.
And though Francis Thompson himself was rather in the Elizabethan
tradition of amplitude and ingenuity, he could write separate lines that
were separate poems in themselves:--
"And thou, what needest with thy tribe's black tents,
Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?"
A mediaeval illuminator would have jumped out of his sandals in his
eagerness to illustrate that.
G.K. CHESTERTON.
FRANCIS THOMPSON
_THREATENED TEARS_
Do not loose those rains thy wet
Eyes, my Fair, unsurely threat;
Do not, Sweet, do not so;
Thou canst not have a single woe,
But this sad and doubtful weatlier
Overcasts us both together.
In the aspect of those known eyes
My soul's a captain weatherwise.
Ah me! what presages it sees
In those watery Hyades.
_ARAB LOVE SONG_
The hunched camels of the night*
Trouble the bright
And silver waters of the moon.
The Maiden of the Morn will soon
Through Heaven stray and sing,
Star gathering.
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