 | The poems of Trumbull Stickney |  |
309
XVII
“DRAMATIC FRAGMENTS
[1904]
I
I used to thinkThe 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.
310
II
BLINDNESS AND DEAFNESS
[Enter X, who learns the dispute and says]
You waste good time.
More philosophic much it were to ask
By speculation or experiment
What midget skims the void of that man
Who being all these together: deaf, dumb, blind,
Yet must within himself, as, sepulchred
'Mid rings of brazen crenellation down
Under tremendous towers, the heart of Cain,
Be alive.
III
THE SOUL OF TIME
Time's a circumference
Whereof the segment of our station seems
A long straight line from nothing into naught.
Therefore we say “progress,” “infinity”—
Dull words whose object
Hangs in the air of error and delights
Our boyish minds ahunt for butterflies.
For aspiration studies not the sky
But looks for stars; the victories of faith
Are soldiered none the less with certainties,
And all the multitudinous armies decked
With banners blown ahead and flute before
March not to the desert or th' Elysian fields,
But in the track of some discovery,
The grip and cognizance of something true,
Which won resolves a better distribution
Between the dreaming mind and real truth.
Whereof the segment of our station seems
A long straight line from nothing into naught.
Therefore we say “progress,” “infinity”—
Dull words whose object
Hangs in the air of error and delights
Our boyish minds ahunt for butterflies.
For aspiration studies not the sky
But looks for stars; the victories of faith
311
And all the multitudinous armies decked
With banners blown ahead and flute before
March not to the desert or th' Elysian fields,
But in the track of some discovery,
The grip and cognizance of something true,
Which won resolves a better distribution
Between the dreaming mind and real truth.
I cannot understand you.
'T is because
You lean over my meaning's edge and feel
A dizziness of the things I have not said.
You lean over my meaning's edge and feel
A dizziness of the things I have not said.
IV
Be patient, very patient; for the skiesWithin my human soul now sunset-flushed
Break desperate magic on the world I knew,
And in the crimson evening flying down
Bell-sounds and birds of ancient ecstasy
Most wonderfully carol one time more.
312
V
Sir, say no more.Within me 't is as if
The green and climbing eyesight of a cat
Crawled near my mind's poor birds.
| The poems of Trumbull Stickney | |