I Used to Think

By Trumbull Stickney 1874–1904 Trumbull Stickney

I used to think

The mind essential in the body, even

As stood the body essential in the mind:

Two inseparable things, by nature equal

And similar, and in creation’s song

Halving the total scale: it is not so.

Unlike and cross like driftwood sticks they come

Churned in the giddy trough: a chunk of pine,

A slab of rosewood: mangled each on each

With knocks and friction, or in deadly pain

Sheathing each other’s splinters: till at last

Without all stuff or shape they ’re jetted up

Where in the bluish moisture rot whate’er

Was vomited in horror from the sea.

Biography

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, . . .

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