: Perpetual Light : a memorial by Ben T William Rose - Poetry

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FOREWORD

BEFORE The Snare of the Fowler Thwarted Utterance The Song of Her "Always I Know You Anew" The Rival Celestial The Tamer of Steeds Love in Armor Wardrobe of Remembrance The Second Covenant Dedication to a First Book The Shadowed Road Love in the Dawn "Had I a Claim to Fame?" The One Dream and Deed A Taper of Incense To Purity Atonement The Adoration Talisman Recognition The Silver Hind Aristeas Relates His Youth Man Possessed Miniature Death Will Make Clear Sunlight And a Long Way Off He Saw Fairyland In Time of Trouble Anomaly The Lover Judgment Unforgotten The Pale Dancer Premonition

FOREWORD

TERESA FRANCES THOMPSON, who also bore my name by marriage, died on January 26, 1919. This verse is published to her memory, because I wish to keep together the poetry she occasioned and enable those who loved her--and they were a great many-to know definitely what she was to me.

I think that is the truth. This is the only means I have at present of acknowledging publicly the vast debt I owe to her.

As I turn these poems over--if they are even to be called poems--I realize that they can never begin to express what her personality was. The earliest ones were written by a boy who was in love, and the latest by a man who has suddenly stepped into the dark. Those between are fragments from the days when we were struggling along together at the everyday tasks and outside interests and dreams that possessed us. The war entered our lives to change them in September, 1917. The poem, "Man Possessed," was written within sound of her actual voice, the others all in absence from her at various times and in moods made strange by absence.

And yet this is all I have at present to give in her memory. But I hold by these because--though they are poor, freakish fragments as far as any real expression of her is concerned--they were made for her.

It is even harder to express in bald prose a personality that had so many sides, so many varying strengths, such inner sight and yet such a forthright splendid intelligence. I have tried once to round it into periods--and have destroyed the attempt. It is my hope that the sister to whom she was devoted with an attachment altogether unusual to most of us will write of her.

If I merely recount the outlines of her life, it loses her. To say that her girlhood was given up to an intense and whole-souled devotion to the life of Christ as taught by the Roman Catholic Church will not even trace the outlines of that great spiritual adventure. But there, in the word "adventure," is a dim ideograph of what she found in life. Every day was an adventure to her with the hope of accomplishing something over and above mere routine and the pursuit of pleasure. And she used to say to me that her life had simply been a series of experiments into which she had put her whole heart, and in which she had always failed. But, of course, she never failed.

She wrote me while I was stationed at Washington:

"Then years after when I was in the Carmelite convent in London, it began to snow. I stood at a window looking out at the snow upon the roofs, and began to think , "Deep on the convent roofs the snows are sparkling to the moon,"--and suddenly I realized that it was St. Agnes Eve, and that long ago, when I was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, I had prayed that I might be a Carmelite nun in England. It was a thrill. No one else knew it. No one else could possibly have brought either of those two things about but Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever."

And she wrote me later:

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