Trumbull Stickney

By George Cabot Lodge

1873-1909


I

In silence, solitude and stern surmise
         His faith was tried and proved commensurate
         With life and death. The stone-blind eyes of Fate
Perpetually stared into his eyes,
Yet to the hazard of the enterprise
         He brought his soul, expectant and elate,
         And challenged, like a champion at the Gate,
Death's undissuadable austerities.
And thus, full-armed in all that Truth reprieves
         From dissolution, he beheld the breath
         Of daybreak flush his thought's exalted ways,
While, like Dodona's sad, prophetic leaves,
         Round him the scant, supreme, momentous days
         Trembled and murmured in the wind of Death.

II

There moved a Presence always by his side,
         With eyes of pleasure and passion and wild tears,
         And on her lips the murmur of many years,
And in her hair the chaplets of a bride;
And with him, hour by hour, came one beside,
         Scatheless of Time and Time's vicissitude,
         Whose lips, perforce of endless solitude,
Were silent and whose eyes were blind and wide.
But when he died came One who wore a wreath
         Of star-light, and with fingers calm and bland
         Smoothed from his brows the trace of mortal pain;
And of the two who stood on either hand,
         "This one is Life," he said, "And this is Death,
         And I am Love and Lord over these twain!"

DayPoems Poem No. 1239
<a href="http://www.daypoems.net/poems/1239.html">Trumbull Stickney by George Cabot Lodge</a>

The DayPoems Poetry Collection, www.daypoems.net
Timothy Bovee, editor

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