Chide me not, darling, that I sing
Familiar thoughts and metres old:
Nay, do not scold
My spirit’s childish uttering.
I know not why ’t is that or this
I murmur to you thus or so:
Only I know
It throbs across my silences,
It blows over my heart,—a long
Infinite wind, again, again!
Again! and then
My life kneels down into a song.
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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Poems by Trumbull Stickney