Page:Poet Lore, volume 26, 1915.djvu/248

234 liberately to heighten the impression of medievalism or seventeenth century quaintness which is often present in his style.

Thompson's sentence structure often delays the reader, for one reason or another, mere length of sentence, involved expression, the omission of a verb or pronoun or both.

Some readers will no doubt find in these things a positive charm, but Thompson is not likely, because of them, to win a very wide fame.

In his stanzaic structure he again escapes the commonplace. Only twenty-three of the seventy-two poems contained in his two volumes (excluding 'Sister Songs') have any regularly repeated stanza form, and, except six sonnets, only three of these forms are ever exactly duplicated by him. Compared with the markedly unoriginal form of many modern poets, his variety is a welcome thing.

The finest of his work takes the form of odes, and this, considered with the very small number of his sonnets, seems significant of the fact that at his best he is the poet of a strong and powerful emotion which will not be contained in the regular levels of repeated stanzas, but which is entirely under his control once he has a free enough form for its expression. His quickly varying thoughts and emotions need a variable meter, which he finds in his odes, where, with iambic tetrameter or pentameter for a norm, he contracts or stretches his line from one to sixteen or twenty syllables. This rapidly changing mode of expression which can hardly grow monotonous explains in some measure the fact that Thompson, with all his subtlety and depth of thought, has a wonderful ability to sustain the fervor and exaltation of his poetry, so that even when a reader loses sight of the sequence of thought he stills feels the emotion, and when both thought and emotion have become clear, the irregular form to which he becomes accustomed, slowly, keeps the poem fresh.

It is not possible to learn the order in which the poems were written. Except for three poems saved for separate comment,