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 THE POETRY OF 
 THOMAS S. JONES, JR. 
 
 JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE 
 
 WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE 
 
 EDWARD J. O'BRIEN 
 
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The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022492122 
 
The Poetry of 
 Thomas S. Jones, Jr. 
 
 Jessie B. Rittenhouse 
 
 William Stanley Braithwaitc 
 
 Edward J. O'Brien 
 
 Privately Printed 
 
 Clinton, New Yoek 
 GEORGE WILLIAM BROWNING 
 1910 
 
 'H 
 
HE essence of all fin^ 
 and subtle things is to 
 leave them unprofaned 
 I by definition, and it is 
 precisely in this reserve, 
 this spiritual reticence, 
 that the work of Mr. 
 Thomas S. Jones, Jr., has its beauty and 
 distinction. Mr. Jones has the gift of 
 suggestion, of invoking the mood without 
 analyzing it, which gives to his work a 
 delicacy of feeling and fineness of touch 
 at variance with the technique of modern 
 verse, which tends more and more to elab- 
 oration. In this regard he has a strong 
 afiSnity with Housman and Miss Reese, 
 though, in the main, unaffected by their 
 manner. Indeed, when he trusts himself 
 wholly, as in the lyric "I went back an 
 old-time lane," or The Little Ghosts or 
 Sometimes, letting the mood convey itself 
 in all its sheer simplicity, his individual 
 note is at once apparent. Along this line 
 lies, unmistakably, his personal gift. 
 
 Modern poetry in its intricacy of form 
 has strayed so far from the unaffected 
 candor of the early lyrists that verse hav- 
 ing this lucidity, this directness, has at 
 once an appeal beyond a more self-con- 
 scious art. It is the charm of Mr. Jones' 
 work that many of his lyrics have a lucid 
 song-quality, and by virtue of this, and 
 their invariably delicate motive, have been 
 
given exquisite musical settings by well- 
 known composers. 
 
 Mr. Jones has published four books 
 of verse, The Path o' Dreams, The Rose- 
 Jar, From Quiet Valleys, and a small vol^ 
 ume, recently issued, called Interludes. 
 Each volume turns more completely from 
 the oracles of others to his own illumina^ 
 tion, each is informed with a finer percep- 
 tion of beauty, a truer vision, a sincerer 
 technique, and while an art that tends so 
 much to delicacy of expression and sub- 
 tilization of mood must lose something of 
 the passion, the primal emotion, that be- 
 longs to poetry of a ruddier note, it 
 gains that impalpable quality that ren- 
 ders poetry a spiritual thing. 
 
 Although Mr. Jones has written de- 
 lightfully of nature, now with graphic pic- 
 turing, now with infectious note, as in the 
 lyric, "0 little buds all bourgeoning with 
 spring," which is instinct with the glad- 
 ness of Herrick, — his most significant 
 themes are subjective, and turn with a cer- 
 tain wistful insistence, akin to the Celt, 
 upon the fugitive passions of yesterday 
 and the illusive dreams of tomorrow. Was 
 it not the spirit of youth that Watts-Dun- 
 ton had in mind when he coined his mag- 
 ical phrase the "Eenaissance of Wonder" 
 — youth addressing itself to the enigma, 
 of desire and pain and death? This old 
 enigma, this new conjecture, one finds in 
 
Mr. Jones' verse, but despite his subjec- 
 tive relation to life, his work is not mel- 
 ancholy nor negative. It belongs with the 
 affirmative things, as his heartening and 
 beautiful sonnet Joyous-Gard, for exam- 
 ple, must attest. 
 
 One may not, in brief compass, speak 
 in detail of Mr. Jones' poems; an instinc- 
 tive sense of form, a sensitive feeling for 
 rhythm and phrase, distinguishes all his 
 work. Technically, if one were to sum it 
 up in a word, it would no doubt be delicacy ; 
 spiritually, it would be subtlety. Its appeal 
 is to those who believe in the reserve of the 
 spirit; it has no word for those who de- 
 mand of the poet a fuller revelation. 
 
 Jessie B. Rittenhouse. 
 
 Oetobtr, 1908. 
 
find exactly the right 
 phrase to define Mr. 
 Jones' poetry would be 
 . as difficult as to bring 
 the reticent, elusive 
 spirit behind the verbal 
 imagery of his verse 
 into the common daylight of analysis. 
 Mr. Jones' art is sheer simplicity of ex- 
 pression, which becomes hauntingly subtle 
 in vision and suggestion when the mean- 
 ing breaks upon one with all force of its 
 tranquillity. Perhaps the clue to the in- 
 spirational side of his work, the touch- 
 stone which brings the poet's soul into com- 
 munion with spiritual things like silence 
 and youth and "buds all bourgeoning with 
 spring," is the power of vision one feels 
 Mr. Jones to possess in a very unusual de- 
 gree; and his ability to focus our spirits 
 to perceive the association of these deli- 
 cate and eternal forces in relation to our 
 own lives, shows how incomparably as 
 an artist he has woven his dreams in- 
 to the very texture of experience through 
 which the hidden consciousness of the 
 soul passes. Mr. Jones does not confront 
 his visions of life with problems to solve. 
 He makes no attempt to untangle unre- 
 strained primal passions, which has be- 
 come the pathological occupation of some 
 recent poets intoxicated with the license 
 of youth. He disengages the sublimations. 
 
extracts those involuntary states of being, 
 when the soul, disembodied from exterior 
 circumstances, lives in other existences, 
 the old that have passed and the new that 
 are to come. These visions reveal to him 
 the loveliness of all living things, and the 
 revelation is a pageantry of change — an 
 eternal recurrence, like the waves of the 
 sea, the rising and setting of sun and 
 stars, the blooming and fading of flowers, 
 youth and age— moving ceaselessly on 
 through time that is poised and fixed in 
 the benevolent hand of God, before whose 
 presence manifested in these visible sem- 
 blances of his greatness, the poet's soul 
 is always in an attitude of beatific wonder. 
 The point of Mr. Jones' vision is illu- 
 minated with memory. This new edition 
 of The Rose-Jar, augmented with many 
 new pieces written since its first ap- 
 pearance four years ago, and including 
 the lovely elegiac sonnets, Ave atque Vale, 
 lamenting the death of Arthur Upson, is 
 a book dedicated to memory. With Mr. 
 Jones memory performs the high Tenny- 
 sonian mission; she is one who 
 
 "stealest fire 
 From the fountains of the past 
 To glorify the present," 
 
 and forbears the future with a wistful 
 assurance of faith. 
 
 It is delightful to come across this 
 insistent note of acceptance and wonder 
 as we find it in Mr. Jones' poetry, self- 
 
 8 
 
sufficing in mood, siBlf-assured in tem- 
 peramental lucidity of speech, among the 
 strange, exotic efforts of some recent song. 
 His lyrics are full of the deepest meanings 
 in life; they are never made obtrusive, 
 becoming thereby counsels, instead of 
 remaining interpretations. They are 
 more compellingly human because the 
 characteristics are personal — personal in 
 the sense that they voice what is most 
 intimate and hidden in every soul, but 
 which never, or seldom, get abroad in a 
 promiscuous recital. Grief and love and 
 sympathy, and the influence of natural 
 objects upon one's emotions, are very 
 secret and personal things ; they are woven 
 in some mysterious way with the intensity 
 of one's religious temper, with one's 
 capacity to absorb the exhilaration of 
 sensuous life; and one possesses them 
 with a dumb ecstasy under the shadow of 
 silence. It is precisely these things that 
 need a language to communicate an under- 
 standing between the soul and those inex- 
 plicable springs of dreams which reach 
 backward and forward in life to the 
 sources of memory and vision. The great 
 crises in human biography do not come 
 with the performance of physical events, 
 in the active embodiment, for the sake of 
 visibility, but in ideas and emotions which 
 have long brought their altering influences 
 in the life of the soul. It is the miracle of 
 
 9 
 
some mood that twists the current of one's 
 thoughts and feelings into new channels, 
 previsioning the future, an abstract actual- 
 ity in its gestatory period, existing between 
 mystery and fact. Yet around the fact 
 time weaves its modifications, wears away 
 the clear outlines with forgetfulness, fades 
 the iridescence in its never ceasing chemic 
 progress, to the dull gray monotone of a 
 million other ashen facts, and so passes it 
 back to the mystery of memory that is 
 but the shadow to the light of vision. These, 
 then, are really the large concerns of the 
 world of consciousness in which our beings 
 move; they lie close to the mystery and 
 might of creation, to the mystery and 
 pathos of death, — like little springs of 
 bubbling water breaking forth from the 
 hillside, broadening through miles and 
 miles of diversified lands till they empty 
 as do thousands of other rivers, into the 
 obliterating sea. And this is the symbol 
 of our human lives. Well, Mr. Jones' 
 poetry touches us at these sources of our 
 natures, and always with 
 
 Hint of some great mystery, 
 Past the outposts of the stars. 
 
 But the suggestion suffices, as it suf- 
 ficed for the Elizabethan lyrists, whose 
 joy was a sort of infectious wonderment, 
 and for Mr. Eobert Bridges, with whose 
 art Mr. Jones is very much akin. But 
 suggestion of this quality has the power 
 
 10 
 
of revealment. It is as a spark that sets 
 our emotions into flames of realization. 
 And really fine poetic art, consummate 
 lyric art, should never do more than that. 
 One might multiply the example, but it 
 is sufficient to take that perfect lyric 
 Sometimes, which brings the force of sug- 
 gestion to a poignant issue. One clings 
 to the meaning in the last line with the 
 soul going through a transfiguration. The 
 experience is one of those spiritual crises 
 in which the personal identity inhabits 
 alternately the substance and shadow of 
 eternity, and comes to realize that the real 
 existence of the soul is always in the 
 shadow. The power of Mr. Jones' vision, 
 generated through the stirrings of mem- 
 ory, is not in making the soul sensible 
 of its unattained growth, but in vividly 
 projecting the ideal that haunted youth's 
 ambitions into the mood, which forces one 
 to realize the attainment in all its spirit- 
 ual significance. And it is the recognition 
 of this essence in the soul, this significant 
 possibility of being which youth proph- 
 esied, the always mystic but very definite 
 symbols of the inner self, that heartens 
 us to set our hopes more resolutely against 
 tomorrow's fulfillment. We feel these mem- 
 ories of youth as the poet sings them, of 
 vanished presences, of seasons that have 
 passed from physical associations into 
 time's obliterating but pregnant silences, 
 
 11 
 
thrilling us as we must imagine the stir^ 
 ring sap to thrill the trembling trunks and 
 branches of trees in early April. And 
 these memories run through our experi- 
 ences to quickening boughs. That is the 
 intensely human quality in Mr. Jones' 
 poetry. The boughs that blossom in our 
 consciousness under the influence of his 
 lyrical communion, are common everyday 
 experiences of joy and sorrow, desire and 
 regret, of hope and resignation, and all the 
 other infinitesimal enigmas that baffle our 
 feelings in denoting their influences, and 
 tax our intellects to unravel the complex 
 mystery of their bondage to mortality ; but 
 lifted in relief and defined against an at- 
 mosphere of artistry simple and subtle as 
 sunlight. 
 
 It is hard, as I said at the beginning, 
 to define that exact quality which seems 
 to capture a responsiveness hidden in those 
 secret springs of feelings, that are seldom 
 worn outwardly in expressive action, but 
 which become very palpable under the 
 quickening ecstasy of Mr. Jones' lyrics. 
 The imagery of these lyrics is always 
 shaped so finely to the emotion; the 
 emotion grows so quietly into one's sense, 
 into one's understanding, with a suffusing 
 revelation like moonlight stealing out of 
 floating clouds. Mr. Jones never does vio- 
 lence to his moods ; they are fine, but never 
 careless, raptures, for he is always con- 
 
 12 
 
scions of his aims to the point of shaping 
 his sentiment to a definite exaltation. The 
 mood may spring from a remote glimmer- 
 ing of beauty, or from some indecipherable 
 signature of dream, but it comes to the 
 reader as the essence of a spiritual expe- 
 rience that quickens the pulse to realiz- 
 ation. Take the lyric The Little Ghosts, 
 and also In the Fall o' Year, and one sees 
 how perfectly Mr. Jones has brought sub- 
 stance and form to crystallization. The 
 quiet ecstasy in these verses shimmering 
 about the delicate instincts of virgin 
 life; is it not this that so pervasively im- 
 pels one's spirit to joy? Youth in 
 humanity, buds and blossoms in flowers 
 and green growing things, spring in the 
 year's seasons, young love in young hearts 
 — pure and potential consciousness in life 
 and nature — it is to these things that the 
 poet is exquisitely sensitive, attuned and 
 vibrant in every rapturous pulse, folding 
 about them his brooding imagination, as 
 a dove folds her protecting wings about 
 her young. Yet this particular note of 
 youth is curiously akin to deeper issues, 
 just as the poet makes nature the medium 
 through which to emphasize some human 
 sentiment. The lyrical web is spun with 
 symbols that decorate the emotional design. 
 Eead the lyrics. Youth and Primavera, 
 and this contact of differences is revealed. 
 The abstraction is always maintained, a 
 
 13 
 
little wistfully, as if for something longed 
 for beyond possible capture, but always 
 existent, and therefore, a refraction of 
 fate. 
 
 The sonnets in this book are of the 
 very best in recent American poetry. 
 They are, as the very best sonnets should 
 be, lyrical in substance and inevitable in 
 their exactness to the prescribed form: 
 Joyous-Gard, A Deserted Village, and the 
 elegiac sequence in memory of Arthur 
 Upson, the fourth of which, with its state- 
 ly Shakespearean phrasing, holds one in 
 its "moment's hush of lifted wings." One 
 must not fail also to number among these 
 On an Idyl of Theocritus, which is redo- 
 lent of the pastoral soil that gave it birth. 
 
 Perhaps the highest and most particu- 
 lar service, in one sense, rendered to 
 poetry in this book, is the repudiation of 
 that sophistry with which so many modern 
 poets regard nature; and this Mr. Jones 
 has done in two of the loveliest of mod- 
 em American lyrics, whose inspiration, 
 coming from nature, flowers in a human 
 sentiment — the tenderest sentiment in the 
 heart of man. Two Songs in Spring would 
 grace an Elizabethan anthology. A mag- 
 ical conceit and art — art that takes spring 
 and her incomparable loveliness for the 
 speech of a simple but intense feeling of 
 the soul. Here indeed is "inarticulate de- 
 light" put into words that render joy 
 
 14 
 
transparent. We shall have to recall Mr. 
 Bridges' "I love all beauteous things," 
 or "I have loved flowers that fade," to 
 match it. And one who does not catch 
 the felicity of the very first line must 
 indeed have lost all savor for a pure 
 draught from the very springs of Helicon. 
 
 William Stanley Braithwaite. 
 February, 1910. 
 
 15 
 
HE little quiet pulling 
 things of life have sel- 
 dom been expressed 
 more simply and feel- 
 ingly than in the poems 
 of Mr. Jones. If a sure 
 instinct and the gift of 
 sympathy be united to an earnest and 
 abiding sense of life's sanctities, the ex- 
 pressional result will reflect most haunt- 
 ingly a realization of all that is deservedly 
 held to be of spiritual import. Accord- 
 ingly, the test of the spiritually conceived 
 lyric is the test of reverent sympathy, and 
 the poet who will have stood this test 
 without engendering a suspicion of inade- 
 quate sincerity, will have proven himself 
 to be in a very real sense one of those 
 set apart and consecrated to the service 
 of the Holy Grail. 
 
 Now this poetic phase is much more 
 than an attitude toward life. It is itself 
 life, if by life we mean the sustaining and 
 directing force which shapes a created 
 thing to a beautiful and glorifying end; 
 and since in life, whose energy is guided 
 through consecration, the spiritual import 
 is of much the more enduring and enno- 
 bling consequence, so also in poetry, whose 
 energy is guided through consecration, 
 the same vital principle is equally true 
 and abiding in its significance. 
 
 It is this aspect of poetry which we 
 
 17 
 
feel to be ever present as the vital element 
 in Mr. Jones' singing, guiding it trium- 
 phantly through the opposing pitfalls of 
 sense and intellect, to a controlled expres- 
 sion, none the less free, of the spiritual 
 significance contained in all those inci- 
 dents, or little adventures, which by the 
 very frequency of their occurrence would 
 seem to have lost for most men, and most 
 poets as well, the beauty that was the first 
 purpose of their very existence. Mr. Jones 
 has the shaping gift. He crystallizes the 
 beauty through a symbol that reflects in a 
 little regarded loveliness the import of a 
 fleeting verity. Most often the poet's out- 
 look is through the lens of memory, un- 
 dimmed save by the sadness which the 
 recollection of lost happiness and lost 
 opportunity must inevitably engender. 
 Simplicity is seldom touched to a more 
 poignant issue untinged of doubt than in 
 the wistful lyric of tearful reticence enti- 
 tled The Little Ghosts. 
 
 Where are they gone, and do you know 
 If they come back at fall o' dew, 
 
 The little ghosts of long ago, 
 That long ago were you? 
 
 And all the songs that ne'er were sung, 
 And all the dreams that ne'er came true, 
 
 Like little children dying young — 
 Do they come back to you? 
 
 And there is a little companion which 
 18 
 
f alters' before the memory, yet bravely 
 phrases it, 
 
 SOMETIMES 
 
 Across the fields of yesterday 
 
 He sometimes comes to me, 
 A little lad just back from play — 
 
 The lad I used to be. 
 
 And yet he smiles so wistfully 
 
 Once he has crept within, 
 I wonder if he hopes to see 
 
 The man I might have been. 
 
 You see the transmutation is so rapid 
 that the poet scarcely detects it. The 
 feeling narrows down to the symbol, and 
 then all at once the symbol widens out 
 into the truth; and since the feeling and 
 the truth are commensurate, you have a 
 little sphere of beauty. The pulling and 
 the emotion have given the lyric poise. 
 The outcome is a trembling crystal. 
 
 It is often true that the very simplic- 
 ity of beauty is baffling. It is so hard to 
 realize that the sum of all colors is white, 
 that the asceticism of purity is the sum 
 of all riotous variety. Especially to those 
 whose sense is finely adjusted to perceive 
 the subtlest aspect of natural beauty, the 
 temptation is to pursue beauty as it flies, 
 to choose the rose and forbear the lily, 
 to seek the beauty of life rather than 
 to express its implicitness. Now one must 
 repudiate this attitude, or otherwise con- 
 fess to a very real limitation which will 
 eventually prove to be its own sadness 
 
 19 
 
and regret. One must look inward rather 
 than outward, and then will he discover a 
 secret. For all that is without, — the won- 
 der and mystery of all that natural 
 beauty, — all this will he find reflected in 
 the chalice of his own believing heart. 
 But the condition of this is purity. 
 
 Now of such is the poetry of Mr. 
 Jones. To him, since his heart has been 
 pure, life holds promise that is reflected 
 from what has gone before. Memory even 
 becomes prophecy under the light of 
 beauty, and voices its message insistently 
 in an undercurrent of suggestion. Such 
 poets are not professed teachers. Eather 
 do they remind us of the Beloved Disciple. 
 They do not penetrate slowly to the core: 
 they are at the core and radiate outward. 
 Beauty speaks through them : they have no 
 need to apostrophize her. When beauty 
 burns in them as well their identification 
 is complete, and they are with the G-rail. 
 To such, and they are few, the page- 
 ant of nature is only a background for 
 the tabernacle of their own souls. Wit- 
 ness the fourth sonnet of Ave atque Vale, 
 an elegiac sonnet-sequence in memory of 
 ill-fated Arthur Upson, the valorous poet 
 whose torch was bequeathed through sym- 
 pathy to those who should come after him. 
 
 I stood to day upon time's border-land 
 
 And looked far off across each rolling year, 
 Yet scarcely their great thunder did I hear 
 
 Nor marked the wreckage of the changing sand; 
 
 20 
 
For one soft note persuasive did command 
 
 All other tones that reached my quickened ear, 
 And in that note a message low and clear 
 
 That I so plainly seemed to understand. 
 
 As in the saddened passing of fair things, 
 The sorrow of the sunset and the dawn. 
 For death that comes when life's hour least should 
 fail- 
 Ever the moment's hush of lifted wings, 
 A gleam of wonder ere the flood is gone . . . 
 The host uncovered from its mortal veil ! 
 
 This omnipresent sense of the sacra- 
 mental beauty of human life as manifested 
 in the rapt spiritual experiences through 
 which it is permitted to pass, has of late 
 become the most vital note in Mr. Jones' 
 poetry, justifying the expression by the 
 sanction of a very genuine mystical belief 
 in the action of the divine force as an 
 inspirational factor, through the ministry 
 of those that have gone before to those 
 who are struggling in the noble endeavor 
 to achieve. 
 
 Never does Mr. Jones betray an undue 
 familiarity with his moods. Ever he 
 shows himself content to be the vessel of 
 the revelation. Far from claiming equality 
 with his song, he ever approaches it with 
 mingled wonder and reverence, and this 
 clothes the inspiration with an intimate 
 human beauty which is of the very essence 
 of romance. This attitude of wonder and 
 reverence is none the less akin to a genuine 
 recognition and contact with the inspira- 
 
 21 
 
tional power, most beautifully exemplified 
 in Joyous-Gard. 
 
 Wind-washed and free, full-swept by rain and wave, 
 By tang of surf and thunder of the gale. 
 Wild be the ride yet safe the barque will • sail 
 
 And past the plunging seas her harbor brave; 
 
 Nor care have I that storms and waters rave, 
 I cannot fear since you can never fail — 
 Once have I looked upon the burning grail. 
 
 And through your eyes have seen beyond the grave. 
 
 I know at last — the strange, sweet mystery, 
 The nameless joy that trembled into tears, 
 The hush of wings when you were at my side — 
 For now the veil is rent and I can see. 
 See the true vision of the future years, 
 As in your face the love of Him who died ! 
 
 No poet feels the fresh ardent joyous- 
 ness of the beautiful life, symbol of hope, 
 more keenly than he; though through it 
 all the mood of Keats, in poring upon 
 youthful ambition, runs as a sad corrector 
 of the leaping joy which will never find 
 its fulfillment. The sadness of youth with 
 all its hopes and anticipations, never to 
 be realized, haunts the poet more than 
 any other sorrow, and tunes his spirit to 
 a forbearing expression whose wistful- 
 ness betrays an instrument strung tightly 
 and responsive to the subtlest note. 
 
 Mr. Jones' development from the ron- 
 deaii stage to his present technical mas- 
 tery of the sonnet would be an interesting 
 study in advancing technique ; but it would 
 hardly be a profitable subject for criti- 
 cism, if by criticism we understand studies 
 
 22 
 
in spiritual interpretation. More vital is 
 the bounding note of wonder at the beauty 
 of life which reflects itself in pure exult- 
 ing lyric gladness. Two Songs in Spring 
 phrases consummately an overmastering 
 tide of loveliness to which the poet aban- 
 dons his heart. One suspects that we are 
 harboring an Elizabethan unwittingly in 
 our midst. I quote the first of these 
 spring-songs. 
 
 little buds all bourgeoning with Spring 
 
 You hold my winter in f orgetf ulness ; 
 Without my window lilac branches swing, 
 Within my gate I hear a robin sing — 
 
 little laughing blooms that lift and bless! 
 
 So blow the breezes in a soft caress, 
 
 Blowing my dreams upon a swallow's wing; 
 little merry buds in dappled dress. 
 You fill my heart with very wantonness — 
 little buds all bourgeoning with Spring! 
 
 Now this is the very highest achievement, 
 — it takes rank with Mr. Bridges at once 
 in feeling and expression. Here the outer 
 force acts on the poet directly, crystalliz- 
 ing all longings unfulfilled and transmu- 
 ting them instantly into the greatest joy. 
 This poem, were there no other, would be 
 a complete sanction for a life devoted to 
 the dream. But on the contrary, it by no 
 means stands alone. I quote it only as a 
 symbol of the poet's joyousness. No one 
 but a child could have written it. The 
 nature symbol, however, serves also as a 
 spring wherefrom to recover past mem- 
 
 23 
 
ory to serve a present and a future need. 
 For what has once been is and, if it be of 
 beauty, shall not perish. 
 
 I feel that this, after all, is the un- 
 voiced message of Mr. Jones, — to prove 
 the immortality of fleeting beauty, by sym- 
 pathy and reverence to look within and 
 find there what the poet seeks without and 
 cannot find. This, a true faith, forecasts 
 the future. 
 
 Tenderness has not been a familiar 
 note in recent American poetry, — sincere 
 tenderness which actuates the song. And 
 for this reason it is the more refreshing 
 to find one within whose- heart it wells up 
 to the present need and dispenses a gentle 
 beauty to a literature which was arid for 
 its lack. To unite tenderness with faith 
 and hope completes the circle of beauty, 
 and the presence of this trinity of inspira- 
 tion is the test of the lyric singer. Mr. 
 Jones has won through experience the 
 golden key. He has not feared to use this 
 key that he might open the tabernacle: 
 combining humility and reverence with 
 faith and courage, he has found the Grail. 
 And so to us comes Beauty through the 
 consecration of a poet's loneliness. 
 
 Edwabd J. O'Beien. 
 
 September, 1910. 
 
 24 
 
By MISS RITTENHOUSE 
 
 The Younger American Poets 
 The Bubdiydt of Omar Khayyam 
 
 Edited, with an Introductory Essay. 
 The Lover's Rubdiydt 
 
 By MR. BRAITHWAITE 
 
 The House of Falling Leaves 
 Lyries of Life and Love 
 The Book of Elizabethan Verse 
 The Book of Restoration Verse 
 The Book of Georgian Verse 
 The Book of Victorian Verse 
 Winding Waters: A River Anthology 
 With Dorothea Lawrence Mann. 
 
 By MR. O'BRIEN 
 
 Edited, with an Introductory Essay. 
 Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism — Third Series 
 Francis Thompson's A Renegade Poet and Other 
 
 Essays 
 John Davidson's The Man Forbid and Other Essays 
 
THE POETRY OF THOMAS S. JONES, JR. 
 
 BY JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE 
 
 \ r"r\ERHAPS nothing could so emphasize the 
 
 I My crystalline clarity of the work of Thomas 
 
 II S. Jones, Jr., as to contrast it with the 
 J-L verse of the cryptic school for the moment 
 
 in vogue in America. Technicians of this school — 
 for one can scarcely call them poets — display such 
 ingenuity in the endeavor to mystify that one is 
 amazed at their dexterity, the while he stands 
 hopeless, and helpless, before it. . If one were not 
 convinced that this is a phase soon to pass, as all 
 abnormalities in art must pass, he would despair 
 of the state into which poetry has fallen. 
 
 The first demand of art is that it be inteUigible, 
 that the artist himself have a clear conception of' 
 what he would convey, or if it be a growing con- 
 ception, clarifying and developing as he executes 
 
the theme, that it shall in the end reflect a pure 
 intelligence, a focused thought, not one befogged 
 by a deliberate attempt at obscurity. The mis- 
 apprehension under which the so-called meta- 
 physical poets, now in the public eye, seem to be 
 laboring is that one cannot be at the same time 
 clear and profound, whereas nothing is profound, 
 but merely turgid and confused, that will not 
 yield its meaning to an intelligent reader. 
 
 From the outset, and it is now rounding the 
 second decade since his first book appeared, the 
 work of Thomas S. Jones, Jr., has stood in the 
 white light which emanates from idealistic poetry, 
 but not in the limeUght, for the two are incom- 
 patible. It is impossible for a poet who is possessed 
 by his vision, who has the spiritual urge toward the 
 expression of beauty as he apprehends it, to be 
 taking thought at one and the same time for the 
 exploitation of that vision. On the contrary, he 
 will shrink from it as a profanation. He is impelled 
 to speak, but he knows not who will hear. He 
 sends his words into the infinite, knowing they will 
 reach those for whom they are intended. It did 
 not distress Shelley that few heard during his life- 
 time, that his voice was drowned by the voice of 
 
Byron and others who had the pubUc ear. With 
 perfect complacency he declared tfhat he had 
 written Prometheus Unbound for five persons, and 
 doubtless he would have written it had none 
 responded. 
 
 The poet, as distinguished from the craftsman, 
 has the burden of utterance laid upon him; he 
 may be the voice cr5dng in the wilderness, but he 
 is none the less obeying the injunction to make 
 straight in the desert a highway for his God. At 
 no period in American literature has the poet who 
 holds his art as a consecration been so isolated as 
 during the last ten or twelve years, when the 
 entire focus of poetry has been upon form and 
 when those who would not turn to the startling 
 or bizarre found themselves stigmatized as con- 
 ventional. The cynical strain which has crept 
 into modem poetry also, the ironical and satirical 
 vein, in line with the same vein in fiction and 
 drama, still further isolates the poet whose work 
 belongs to the constructive rather than destructive 
 forces of life. 
 
 Unless the poet ca:n look deeper than other men, 
 below these things which make for cynicism, and 
 not satirize life but reveal it, he is no less purblind 
 
than the rest and has no right to demand that 
 we see through his eyes. It may be said of Thomas 
 S. Jones, Jr., that he has always seen clearly, that 
 he has the vision implied in the words "if thine 
 eye be single," the ability to look through all the 
 baffling contradictions of life to the one Life, to 
 see the Perfection through all the imperfection of 
 its hmnan manifestations. 
 
 It is this vision which has been the source, the 
 iimer compulsion, of his poetry. It was expressed 
 most explicitly, perhaps, in his well-known poem. 
 In Excelsis, which inspired Edith Thomas with 
 one of her own best lyrics, but it is inherent in all 
 of his work embodied in The Rose-Jar, From Quiet 
 Valleys, The Voice in the Silence and several other 
 volumes which were the fruit of his first creative 
 years. Deep within a certain wistful note, as a 
 tone within a tone, is a serene and ineradicable 
 joy which gives a mellow beauty to all that he 
 does: 
 
 I wonder if the tides of Spring 
 Will always bring me back again 
 
 Mute rapture at the simple thing 
 Of lilacs blowing in the rain. 
 
If so, my heart will ever be 
 Above all fear, for I shall know 
 
 There is a greater mystery 
 Beyond the time when lilacs blow. 
 
 In these exigent days which carry us on too 
 rapidly for contemplation, when hfe is so compli- 
 cated and absorbing, demanding more and more 
 of the individual, such poetry as that of Mr. 
 Jones' offers a refuge, a sanctuary, as though one 
 suddenly withdrew from a crowded, garish street 
 into some exquisite place of tempered light. 
 
 Into one line of an early lyric he has put perhaps 
 the secret of that beauty which trances his work 
 with a certain magic stillness, the line which 
 speaks of 
 
 That last strange peace whose name is loneliness. 
 
 Here is the mystical turning back of the soul from 
 all external things, the solitude which is the divine 
 companionship, expressed by Lionel Johnson in 
 the line. 
 
 Lonely unto the Lgne I go. 
 
No poet of our day has known this ' ' strange peace, ' ' 
 this sense of the divine immanence, more deeply 
 than Mr. Jones has known it; at least no poet has 
 made us more conscious of it in his work. 
 
 He has not won through to this serener air, 
 however, without the struggle and adjustment 
 which come to all thinking people. It is not 
 wholly an intuition but a victory. Mr. Jones has 
 not the cheap philosophy that all's well with the 
 world, but the hard-won philosophy that takes 
 full account of what is wrong with the world, 
 while he sees with the larger understanding what 
 is emerging through it all. It was, indeed, a 
 source of wonderment to me when I first knew 
 Mr. Jones' work, with its golden light as of the 
 sun through stained glass, that a poet of a challeng- 
 ing mentahty and a crusader's temperament, ready 
 to break a lance at any moment for his ideal, 
 should, when it came to the expression of his art, 
 be able to suffuse it with the light which never 
 was on sea or land. It is because he has the gift 
 to subtihze all experience until it passes into its 
 finer meaning, its spiritual residue. 
 
 There are poets bom to depict, to give us the 
 event, the gross fact, and there are poets bom to 
 
interpret, to give us the inner meaning of the 
 event, the finer significance of the fact. A man 
 hke Sandburg, for example, who works wholly in 
 the raw material of life, presents a great picture 
 of the human swarm in its welter of existence, but 
 this is photographic. We demand of him a finer 
 vision, some intimation of the end, the spiritual 
 evolution working through this chaos of life. 
 
 No one could be more removed in his approach 
 to the human problem than a poet like Mr. Jones 
 from a poet like Sandburg, and this is not in any 
 sense to say that Sandburg is not a tremendous 
 force in modem literature, but merely that he is 
 an extreme instance of the objective poet, of one 
 who spreads life before you in all its phases as it 
 functions physically, whereas a poet like Mr. 
 Jones is concerned with humanity as it functions 
 spiritually, and with the force which has brought 
 it thus far, though seons yet from its perfection. 
 
 It must have been some such thought as this 
 which led him into a field of research which has 
 turned under his hand into a field of enchantment 
 to which we are admitted in the two volumes, 
 Sonnets of the Cross, and Sonnets of the Saints, 
 volumes which not only belong indubitably to the 
 
realm of high poetry, but form a wonderful study 
 of the evolution of Christianity in Britain from 
 the Druid period through several centuries of the 
 early church, with all the romantic and dramatic 
 background involved; for the lives of the saints 
 are sheer drama, and one sonnet of Mr. Jones' 
 may contain the germ of a miracle-play or the 
 material for an absorbing novel, if one could be 
 found with the combined reverence and art to 
 approach it. 
 
 The word "saint" is a deterrent to most people, 
 connoting, as it does, a certain sanctity which 
 places the canonized above the ranks of humanity, 
 but one does not stop to think that the saints were 
 militant human beings who fought for their ideals 
 and about whom the most picturesque events 
 constantly took shape. Any one of them was the 
 center of a thrilling drama, and no richer field 
 from the standpoint of pure literature can be 
 found than that which re-creates for us these lives 
 and unfolds them in a sequence so that we see the 
 influence of one upon another and the unconquer- 
 able progress of the spirit. 
 
 It is certain, however, that Mr. Jones did not 
 approach these lives from the vantage ground of 
 
literature or with the intention so to utilize them, 
 but wholly from an absorption in the great story 
 of Christianity as it won its way in Britain. There 
 are six sonnets of the pre-Christian period which 
 show the intercourse between Tjnre and the East 
 and Britain before the coming of Joseph of Arima- 
 thea to Yniswitrin, sacred isle of the Druids and 
 by legend site of the first wattled Christian church, 
 said to have been built about 63 A. D., by Joseph, 
 who brought with him relics of the Passion. 
 
 Sonnets of the Cross trace the progress of the 
 faith from Glaston and Whithorn to Ireland, to 
 lona, to Northumbria, the christianizing of the 
 North by Oswald and Aidan and the recording 
 of the faith by Bede. 
 
 The second volume. Sonnets of the Saints, 
 perhaps the more beautiful of the two, having 
 such rich material that each sonnet is like a bit 
 of tapestry, carries the story down to the period 
 of Saint Thomas Aquinas and forms in a sense a 
 sequel to the first volume. Together they show a 
 knowledge of the period so profound that one is 
 abashed before it, or would be save that this 
 knowledge has become so much a part of the 
 poet's own mind and soul as to seem not an acquisi- 
 
tion but an experience, something that he has felt 
 and lived as completely as if he had been a partici- 
 pant in the events recorded. As in all of Mr. 
 Jones' work, the mere fact has become to him 
 subjective, or perhaps we may say that it has 
 become subUmated, that it has taken on its 
 spiritual aura and emerges irradiated with that 
 light which is so peculiarly his gift and distinction. 
 The sonnets are flawless in artistry, and one 
 might feel that they had been cut like jewels, did 
 he not know from the entire evidence of Mr. 
 Jones' work that his art is not conscious but 
 instinctive, that he has the feeling for words which 
 belong to him, words of amber and crystal, of 
 subdued warmth and brightness, such as these 
 in The Blessing of Columcille: 
 
 Torqued warriors turned their galley's crimson prow 
 To hear a white monk hynm the Holy Three 
 In Derry's orchard vale beside the sea, 
 
 The light of peace upon his shining brow; 
 
 And angels, watching near the forest plough. 
 Saw Colum's blessing change the withered tree, 
 Cursed by the demon riders from the shee, 
 
 And bring the wild sweet apples to the bough. 
 
 10 
 
Beneath his voice, clear as a ringing bell, 
 Dark kerns laid down their spear-shafts, then were still. 
 And in each bitter heart the sweet fruit grew; 
 Dim oak woods, wakened from the Druid spell, 
 Shone white with wings; and on the sunset hill 
 The old gods listened, lonely in the dew. 
 
 Magic grows more and more rare in poetry, but 
 here it is, pristine and unmistakable, in the line. 
 
 The old gods listened, lonely in the dew. 
 
 Nor is it verbal magic alone, but that larger 
 magic of suggestion, of implication. Here is all 
 the pathos of a bygone beauty. The old order 
 passes, in the faiths of men as well as in temporal 
 Ufe, but not without leaving a precious residue, 
 something embalmed forever in the imagination 
 with things lost and dispossessed, which still have 
 a being and reality more palpable than things 
 which we see and touch. 
 
 It is that Mr. Jones makes us free again of 
 epochs that have passed into the twilight of 
 memory, restores for us the glamour of far-off 
 things, that these sonnets are so exquisite as 
 poetry, and it is as poetry that we are chiefly 
 
 II 
 
concerned with them, though they are of great 
 importance in the reahn of devotional hterature 
 since they focus an entire period, the whole expres- 
 sion of early Christianity in Britain, through the 
 many personalities and events which attended 
 its unfolding. So far as I know, there is nothing 
 in English literature which makes this focus, 
 certainly not through a sequence of sonnets, and 
 Mr. Jones' poetry would be sure of a place on this 
 ground alone, but far more surely for the intrinsic 
 quality of the sonnets themselves, for an art which 
 is above praise. 
 
 The sonnets are not mystical, save as the word 
 connotes a sense of spiritual realization. They 
 have not the abstract quality which usually 
 accompanies mystical verse. Their emphasis is 
 upon the human; they are of lives, but of lives 
 under compulsion of the divine. The simplest 
 incident which shows this compulsion may be the 
 subject of a sonnet and one of my favorites, 
 because of its tenderness and the quiet loveliness 
 of the picture, is The Silver Wain, a legend of 
 St. Isidore the Ploughman: 
 
 12 
 
When russet wagons left the Lammas field, 
 The land's fierce lord through wood and pasture rode 
 Along the trembling pool where sunset glowed 
 
 Red as the rivets of his heavy shield; 
 
 Across the blackbird's song a clear bell pealed, 
 And tawny bulls, obedient to the goad. 
 Paused while a peasant prayed beside his load 
 
 Sweet with the grass that clovered meadows yield. 
 
 On rushed the knight, but dropped his lifted spear 
 To see among the swathes of fallen hay 
 White oxen coupled with a golden chain, 
 And, still as starlight on the purple weir, 
 Where his old ploughman knelt so late to pray 
 An angel walking by a silver wain. 
 
 Perhaps we have space to put into contrast a 
 more dramatic sonnet, not the most dramatic, 
 which is The Stag of Cheddar, but one which shows 
 Love actuating a deed, a deed which turns under 
 Mr. Jones' hand to an unforgettable bit of art, 
 but which we feel instinctively he did not approach 
 as art but as an expression of that Love which 
 Dante declared moves the sun and all the other 
 stars. The deed is that of St. Anselm succoring 
 the wounded hare: 
 
 13 
 
By grange and castle when the fields were cool 
 Saint Anseka rode and marked how swans afloat 
 Upon the lilied waters of the moat 
 
 Reposed in love mitaught by rod or rule; 
 
 And while he paused beside the reedy pool, 
 A brindled hare with blood upon her coat 
 Took refuge from the pack's deep baying note 
 
 Beneath the scarlet housings of his mule. 
 
 But when the savage hunters sought their prey, 
 At his command their hounds refused to spring, 
 Held back like wolves within a forest snare; 
 And with bent bows, they watched him ride away, 
 Tender as Christ Who heals each broken thing. 
 Bearing against his breast the wounded hare. 
 
 Robert Tristram Coffin, himself a poet of 
 
 distinction, has caught the charm of Mr. Jones' 
 
 work in a phrase — "running water, smooth and 
 
 sun-shot." It is a fitting symbol, for sun-shot 
 
 water has a magic. It turns even the stones over 
 
 which it passes into gems. And running water 
 
 has a music which holds within its tranquiUity an 
 
 irresistible joy. 
 
 Reprinted from Boston Evening Transcript, April r6, 
 1927. 
 
MOSHER BOOKS 
 
 BY THOMAS S. JONES, JR. 
 
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