Today’s Poem: The Melancholy Year is Dead with Rain

Trumbull Stickney’s brief, sad intensity

Edvard Munch, Autumn Rain, 1898 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Melancholy Year Is Dead with Rain

by Trumbull Stickney

The melancholy year is dead with rain.
Drop after drop on every branch pursues.
From far away beyond the drizzled flues
A twilight saddens to the window pane.
And dimly thro’ the chambers of the brain,
From place to place and gently touching, moves
My one and irrecoverable love’s
Dear and lost shape one other time again.
So in the last of autumn for a day
Summer or summer's memory returns.
So in a mountain desolation burns
Some rich belated flower, and with the gray
Sick weather, in the world of rotting ferns
From out the dreadful stones it dies away.

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Joseph Trumbull Stickney (1874–1904) belongs to a lost generation of Harvard poets. Although he is the subject, and speaker of a brief poem by the contemporary poet (and Poems Ancient and Modern reader) Jared Carter, Stickney’s name — like Thomas Parker Sanborn’s, or George Cabot Lodge’s, or Philip Henry Savage’s, or Hugh McCulloch’s — no longer rings that many bells in our collective cultural mind.

But once upon a time, at the end of the nineteenth century in America, in the waning light of New England Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, these were the names of the big men on campus. They were the big literary men, at any rate. Sanborn founded the Harvard Monthly; the others wrote for it. In his undergraduate years, from 1891 to 1895, Trumbull Stickney was its editor. Taken together, in a group known as the “Harvard Pessimists,” they were the poster boys for literary promise. And they all died young. 

Stickney died at thirty, of a brain tumor. The timeline of his career is short and intense. Born in Switzerland, early years spent in Europe. Harvard, of course, which he entered at seventeen, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in classics. Then the Sorbonne, where he was the first American to receive the degree of docteur ès lettres, writing the customary two dissertations: one in French, a study of Greek poetry from Homer to Euripides, and the other, on the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro, in Latin. In 1902 he published his one book of poetry, Dramatic Verses. In 1903, he returned to Harvard as an instructor in classics. The next year, he was dead. 

Trumbull Stickney (Poets.org)

Today’s Poem seems in keeping with the sad intensity of its author’s biography. It observes the tight constraints of the Petrarchan sonnet, albeit with a variation in the second quatrain, making the rhyme scheme in the octet abbaacca, rather than the standard abbaabba. Within those parameters, the poem is thick with language — “the drizzled flues,” the twilight that “saddens” to the window — that invests the entire scene with human emotion. We might also note certain emphatic metrical substitutions in lines 2, 8, 10, and 13, which all begin on a stressed syllable, rather than the usual and expected unstressed syllable that forms the first half of an iamb. 

The external particulars of branches and chimneys and window panes shift without transition into the house of the brain, through whose dim rooms, like the rooms of the literal house, the “shape” of  a remembered “lost” love moves like a housewife, “gently touching” things as she passes. And all of it, ultimately, is a figure for autumn melancholy, the longing for a summer dead and gone. 

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