Promise is a deadly thing. Cyril Connolly once described it as though promise were an English disease: a condition that elevates young writers and then leaves them unfulfilled — that makes them shoot to green heights and then go to seed.

Trumbull Stickney (1874–1904) gives us a American picture of promise unfulfilled. He died young, of a brain tumor at age thirty, but even his works from his twenties are not yet what his promise might have promised. And make no mistake, Stickney had promise. He was editor of the Harvard Monthly while an undergraduate and then became the first American to earn a doctorate of letters from the Sorbonne. He returned to teach Classics at Harvard only a year before his death.

“In the Past” is an odd and interesting construction that shows both his promise and its unfulfillment. In eleven quatrains, rhymed abab, he deliberately wavers between trimeter and tetrameter, leaving us as uncertain as the poem’s boatman. The speaker emerges as a dead soul, lost on a dead lake — and “That boatman am I.” And yet, sometimes the light breaks through the sad, dead depression of a lost soul — and “The heart is alive of the boatman there: / That boatman am I.”

In the Past
by Trumbull Stickney

There lies a somnolent lake
Under a noiseless sky,
Where never the mornings break
Nor the evenings die.

Mad flakes of colour 
Whirl on its even face
Iridescent and streaked with pallour;
And, warding the silent place,

The rocks rise sheer and gray
From the sedgeless brink to the sky
Dull-lit with the light of pale half-day
Thro’ a void space and dry.

And the hours lag dead in the air 
With a sense of coming eternity
To the heart of the lonely boatman there:
That boatman am I,

I, in my lonely boat,
A waif on the somnolent lake,
Watching the colours creep and float
With the sinuous track of a snake.

Now I lean o’er the side
And lazy shades in the water see,
Lapped in the sweep of a sluggish tide
Crawled in from the living sea;

And next I fix mine eyes,
So long that the heart declines,
On the changeless face of the open skies
Where no star shines;

And now to the rocks I turn,
To the rocks, around
That lie like walls of a circling sun
Wherein lie bound

The waters that feel my powerless strength
And meet my homeless oar
Labouring over their ashen length
Never to find a shore.

But the gleam still skims
At times on the somnolent lake,
And a light there is that swims
With the whirl of a snake;

And tho’ dead be the hours i’ the air,
And dayless the sky,
The heart is alive of the boatman there:
That boatman am I.

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.