Trumbull Stickney - "In the Past" (poem)

In the Past

There lies a somnolent lake
Under a noiseless sky,
Where never the mornings break
Nor the evenings die.

Mad flakes of colour
Whirl on its even face
Iridescent and streaked with pallour;
And, warding the silent place,

The rocks rise sheer and gray
From the sedgeless brink to the sky
Dull-lit with the light of pale half-day
Thro’ a void space and dry.

And the hours lag dead in the air
With a sense of coming eternity
To the heart of the lonely boatman there:
That boatman am I,

I, in my lonely boat,
A waif on the somnolent lake,
Watching the colours creep and float
With the sinuous track of a snake.

Now I lean o’er the side
And lazy shades in the water see,
Lapped in the sweep of a sluggish tide
Crawled in from the living sea;

And next I fix mine eyes,
So long that the heart declines,
On the changeless face of the open skies
Where no star shines;

And now to the rocks I turn,
To the rocks, around
That lie like walls of a circling sun
Wherein lie bound

The waters that feel my powerless strength
And meet my homeless oar
Labouring over their ashen length
Never to find a shore.

But the gleam still skims
At times on the somnolent lake,
And a light there is that swims
With the whirl of a snake;

And tho’ dead be the hours i’ the air,
And dayless the sky,
The heart is alive of the boatman there:
That boatman am I.


- Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904


 

Trumbull Stickney - "And, the Last Day Being Come, Man Stood Alone" (poem)

And, the Last Day Being Come, Man Stood Alone

And, the last day being come, Man stood alone
Ere sunrise on the world’s dismantled verge,
Awaiting how from everywhere should urge
The Coming of the Lord. And, behold, none

Did come,—but indistinct from every realm
Of earth and air and water, growing more
And louder, shriller, heavier, a roar
Up the dun atmosphere did overwhelm

His ears; and as he looked affrighted round
Every manner of beast innumerable
All thro’ the shadows crying grew, until
The wailing was like grass upon the ground.

Asudden then within his human side
Their anguish, since the goad he wielded first,
And, since he gave them not to drink, their thirst,
Darted compressed and vital.—As he died,

Low in the East now lighting gorgeously
He saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed
Which, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed
To pluck the sun down into the dead sea.


- Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904


 

Trumbull Stickney - "Mnemosyne" (poem)

Mnemosyne

It's autumn in the country I remember.
How warm a wind blew here about the ways!

And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber

During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.

 

It's cold abroad the country I remember.

 

The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain

At midday with a wing aslant and limber;

And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain.

 

It 's empty down the country I remember.

 

I had a sister lovely in my sight:

Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre;

We sang together in the woods at night.

 

It's lonely in the country I remember.

 

The babble of our children fills my ears,

And on our hearth I stare the perished ember

To flames that show all starry thro' my tears.

 

It's dark about the country I remember.

 

There are the mountains where I lived. The path

Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber,

The stumps are twisted by the tempests' wrath.

 

But that I knew these places are my own,

I'd ask how came such wretchedness to cumber

The earth, and I to people it alone.

 

It rains across the country I remember.


- Trumbull Stickney, 1874-1904


 

Trumbull Stickney - "Song" (poem)

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

http://www.vukutu.com/blog/2008/10/friday-poem-song/

 

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 -

http://www23.us.archive.org/stream/poemsoftrumbulls00sticuoft/poemsoftrumbulls00sticuoft_djvu.txt

 

Select Poems by Poem Hunter -

http://www.poemhunter.com/trumbull-stickney/poems/page-1/?a=a&l=1&y=

 

A More Complete Listing by Poem Hunter (.pdf) -

http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/trumbull_stickney_2004_9.pdf

 

Select Poems by Poetry Foundation -

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/trumbull-stickney#about

 

 

Biography (from Wikipedia)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumbull_Stickney

 

Joseph Trumbull Stickney (June 20, 1874 – October 11, 1904) was an American classical scholar and poet. His style has been characterised^{[by whom?]} as fin de siècle and he is known^{[by whom?]} for his sonnets in particular.

 

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.

 

He then published a first book of verse Dramatic Verses (1902) and took a position as Instructor in Classics at Harvard (1903), but died in Boston of a brain tumour a year later.^[2] Stickney belongs to the number of Harvard poets (or the Harvard Pessimists) who died young, such as Thomas Parker Sanborn, George Cabot Lodge, Philip Henry Savage and Hugh McCulloch.

Poetic Works

• Dramatic Verses (1902)
• The poems of Trumbull Stickney (1905) edited by George Cabot Lodge; William Vaughn Moody, and John Ellerton Lodge
• Trumbull Stickney (1973) edited by Amberys R. Whittle

 

 

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.