Trumbull Stickney

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.

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!”