Song
A bud has burst on the upper bough
(The linnet sang in my heart today);
I know where the pale green grasses show
By a tiny runnel, off the way,
And the earth is wet.
(A cuckoo said in my brain: “Not yet.”)
I nabbed the fly in a briar rose
(The linnet to-day in my heart did sing);
Last night, my head tucked under my wing,
I dreamed of a green moon-moth that glows
Thro’ ferns of June.
(A cuckoo said in my brain: “So soon?”)
Good-bye, for the pretty leaves are down
(The linnet sang in my heart today);
The last gold bit of upland’s mown,
And most of summer has blown away
Thro’ the garden gate.
(A cuckoo said in my brain: “Too late.”)
- Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904
"Song" Notes
- a linnet is melodious songbird finch
- a runnel is a narrow watercourse
- a gold bit mown is a field of hay
Analysis
by Peter @ Vukutu
Joe Stickney (1874-1904) was a student of George Santayana at Harvard and later friends with him and with Henry Adams in Paris, where Stickney received the first doctorate of letters from the Sorbonne given to an American. Adams wrote of him: ”[in Paris one could] totter about with Joe Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry” (The Education, p. 1088) and, “Bay Lodge and Joe Stickney had given birth to the wholly new and original party of Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore true poetry under the inspiration of the Gotterdammerung.” (The Education, p. 1090).
Stickney traveled in Europe and then taught Greek at Harvard, before dying suddenly of a brain tumour. Stickney’s poetry has an elegaic, autumnal feel about it, a sense of loss; it is writing from the end of an era, rather than from the start of one, as is Pounds’ or Eliot’s. Here is “Song“, written in 1902, and very appropriate for the season we in the northern hemisphere are now in.
References
The Complete Poems of Trumbull Stickney -
Select Poems by Poem Hunter -
A More Complete Listing by Poem Hunter (.pdf) -
Select Poems by Poetry Foundation -
Biography (from Wikipedia)
He was born in
Geneva[1] and spent much of his early life in
Europe. He attended
Harvard University from 1891, when he became editor of the
Harvard Monthly and a member of
Signet society, to 1895, when he graduated magna cum laude. He then studied for seven years in Paris, taking a doctorate at the
Sorbonne. He wrote there two dissertations, a Latin one on the Venetian humanist
Ermolao Barbaro, and the other on
Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grecque. His was the first American
docteur ès lettres.
Poetic Works
Biography(from the Poetry Foundation)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/trumbull-Stickney
Trumbull Stickney
1874–1904
Trumbull Stickney is
best remembered as a promising young poet and scholar who died before his work
could fully mature. As William Payne described his poems in a 1906 review for
Dial: "Promise rather than fulfillment is the mark of this work as a
whole, for it reveals Stickney as still groping for a distinctive manner rather
than as having reached a definitive expression of his powers." A brilliant
scholar and enthusiastic poet, Stickney died at the age of thirty, just as he
was beginning to achieve a unique poetic voice. His friends and admirers have
since mined his brief works to find what might have been, but often his poems
reveal only the "promise" Payne found in 1906.
Joseph Trumbull Stickney
was born in Geneva, Switzerland on June 20, 1874. His parents, Austin and
Harriet Trumbull Stickney, were of impressive lineage and impressive schooling:
Austin was a classics professor at Trinity College, and Harriet was a descendent
of the colonial governor Jonathan Trumbull. Stickney was raised as befitted the
child of such learned and lettered kin. He traveled widely, and apart from some
brief studies at Walton Lodge and New York's Cutler's school, was taught
entirely by his father. After this thorough, cosmopolitan education, Stickney
matriculated at Harvard where he bore out the promise invested in him; he was
the first freshman to be elected to the editorial board at the Harvard
Monthly. Though Stickney published his verses in various college journals,
his social circle was centered at the Monthly. There, he met George
Cabot Lodge and William Vaughn Moody—two writers who
would later edit one of Stickney's posthumous verse collections. Much of
Stickney's undergraduate poetry was published in the pages of the
Monthly, as well as some criticism of his beloved Greek literature.
Throughout his career, Stickney seems to have felt torn between his
academic and literary passions. Nonetheless, after achieving his A.B. (magna cum
laude) in 1895, Stickney pursued his studies at the Sorbonne, composing two
theses, one a biography of Ermolao Barbaro and one a study of the gnomic
elements of Greek poetry. His studies seemed not to nourish him, however; when
George Cabot Lodge visited Stickney in 1895-96, he commented that Stickney
seemed in "mute not cheerful despair." While in school, Stickney struggled to
reconcile his divided interests. While hacking away at the profession he had
resigned himself to pursue, he continued to write poetry, notably his long poem
"Kalypso" (later published in Dramatic Verses, 1902). Though he planned
to publish his work, he felt he was as yet unready, that his work "ha[d] too
much thought," according to Michele J. Leggott in the Dictionary of Literary
Biography.
His work from this period suggests that he was
attempting to rectify that failing. For example, a sonnet written in 1895 called
"Cologne Cathedral" shows a shift from the cerebral, antique lines of his early
work toward sensual evocations: "Prayer carved the sable flowers; a choral spun
/ Rose-windows in the aisle; and music stayed / So silken-long by arch and
colonnade / That the lines trembled out and followed on[.]" In this passage,
Stickney describes the relationship between song and architecture in a fresh
way: rather than focusing on the immortality of verse compared to marble
monuments, Stickney shows how the visual world can be created by the aural
world. "Prayer carved the sable flowers," he writes, suggesting that spiritually
infused words can shape the solid world.
Many of Stickney's poems from
this period relate to an affair he may have had between 1896 and 1899. (After
Stickney's death, his family destroyed all letters relating to unseemly love
affairs or requests for funding, so his romantic life will forever be private.)
As these lines from poems of that period suggest, however, Stickney became
focused on the despair of love: "I heard a dead leaf run. It crossed / My way.
For dark I could not see. / It rattled crisp and thin with frost / Out to the
lea." By the time the affair ended in 1899, however, Stickney had composed much
of his first volume of poetry—but he was unable to find a publisher for it. He
wrote despondently to his sister, according to Leggott, "with some resignation I
put off the hope of my life. Bay [George Cabot] Lodge publishes a novel and
another volume this year." The "hope of [Stickney's] life" did not have to wait
long, however: by 1902, he located a publisher for his verses: Charles E.
Goodspeed in Boston.
The volume, Dramatic Verses, includes many
of Stickney's poems from his Paris days, as well as some work written earlier.
In Reference Guide to American Literature, Earl Rovit wrote of this
early work that "Stickney's tempered musicality sustains the conventional form
structures, raising these poems above the level of similar lamentations that the
Mauve Decade manufactured in wholesale lots." One year later, Stickney graduated
from the Sorbonne, thus becoming the first American to win the prestigious
Doctorat es Lettres there. He took a brief tour of Greece—"a sort of bacchanal,"
as he described it, according to Leggott—before returning to an academic post at
Harvard.
His life as an instructor proved as unfulfilling as his life as
a student, however. As quoted by Leggott, he wrote to Henry Adams in 1903: "You
refer to the last thing excavated on classic soil, my own torso. It proves not
to be an antique at all, but a work of a New England sculptor who was wrecked in
a dory off the Peloponnesian Coast. On being presented to Harvard University, it
was found the torso had convulsions and couldn't be kept in place. So it is
being packed for further travel."
Not only was Stickney unhappy in his
work, but he also began to experience terrible headaches as well as periodic
"blind spells." He continued to teach and write, but on October 11, 1904 he died
of a brain tumor. Like some other poets who have died young, Stickney produced
some of his best works in the months leading up to his death. One late fragment,
"Sir, say no more," hints tantalizingly at what future was lost when Stickney
died: "Sir, say no more. / Within me 'tis as if / The green and climbing
eyesight of a cat / Crawled near my mind's poor birds." Like many poets who died
young, too, Stickney found his greatest fame after death. His friends Lodge and
Moony soon published an edition of his collected poetry, in which critics
recognized a "romantic and wistful temper."
Later readers of Stickney's
poetry similarly found his work intriguing. Stickney was praised by such
notables as Conrad
Aiken, William Rose Benet, Louis Untermeyer, Allen Tate, Mark Van
Doren, W. H.
Auden, Oscar Williams, and John Hollander. Hollander, writing for the
New York Times Book Section, suggested that "his work appears more
central than ever.... The interest is not in style, but in the grasp of the
visionary moment." As a writer for The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century
Poetry in English remarked, "Stickney was steeped in Greek thought and
literature, yet his poems exhibit a curiously tortured modern sensibility."
Indeed, he has become in some ways representative of his period. As Rovit wrote,
"he exhibited a cultural impulse that was later followed more extensively by
writers like Ezra
Pound and T. S.
Eliot." Stickney's poetry shows glimmers of what it might have become:
intellectually intense, given to emotional plunges, rhythmically daring. His few
verses offer the raw elements of a finely balanced poetic gift, but those
elements are, as Payne noted, "promise rather than fulfillment."
Career
Instructor of Greek at Harvard University, 1903-04. Writer.
Bibliography
- Dramatic Verses, Charles E. Goodspeed (Boston), 1902.
- Les Sentences dans la Poesie Grecque d'Homere a Euripedes, Societe
Nouvelle de Librairie et d'Edition (Paris), 1903.
- De Hermolai Barbari vita atque ingenio dissertationem, Societe
Nouvelle de Librairie et d'Edition, 1903.
- The Poems of Trumbull Stickney, edited by George Cabot Lodge,
William Vaughn Moody, and John Ellerton Lodge, Houghton (Boston), 1905.
- Homage to Trumbull Stickney: Poems, edited by James Reeves and Sean
Haldane, Heinemann (London), 1968.
- The Poems of Trumbull Stickney, edited by Amberys R. Whittle,
Farrar, Straus (New York City), 1972.
Other
- (Translator with Sylvain Levi) Bhagavad-Gita, Librairie d'Amerique
et d'Orient (Paris), 1938.
Contributor to Harvard Monthly.
Further Reading
Books
- Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature,
HarperCollins, 1991.
- Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 54: American Poets,
1880-1945, Third Series, Gale, 1987.
- Gale, Robert, The Gay Nineties in America, Greenwood Press, 1992.
- Modern American Literature, St. James, 1999.
- The Oxford Companion to American Literature, Oxford University
Press, 1995.
- The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, Oxford
University Press, 1994.
- Reference Guide to American Literature, St. James, 1994.
Periodicals
- Dial, July 16, 1903.
- New York Times, July 16, 1972, p. 5.