Page:Poet Lore, volume 26, 1915.djvu/261

Rh meter. At times both seem to show that they are translations, but the first is like much of Thompson's own work descriptive of the sun, and the second must have made a particularly deep appeal to him, dealing with the correspondence of nature and humanity. It ends:

The final group of poems, 'Ultima,' are love poems in which something of the seventeenth century lover remains, but with less of the elaborate artificiality of the 'Love in Dian's Lap' series. The most charming is, perhaps, 'My Lady the Tyranness,' which retains the spirituality and something of the naiveté of the earlier poems, but has much more life and vigor, much more of Thompson. He tells of his search for something of his own which is not subject to his lady; finding she is sovereign over his earth, his thought and life and death, his heaven, and even his God, he relinquishes the search and gives her also his fame, which, he then recalls, she alone created for him.

At the end of the volume is an envoy, the last stanza of which may perhaps be taken as an adequate explanation of the poet's contradictory moods, his alternating exaltation and despair. It reads:

With all that there is of interest and beauty and value in the above-mentioned poems, I find that I value Thompson most highly for three ideas expressed in three other poems, which seem to me his finest, and so much his finest that I have saved them for separate comment.

The first is 'The Hound of Heaven,' by which he is most widely known. It is an ode descriptive of the hound-like pursuit of God through the universe for the wayward or rebellious human