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Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904)

I Used to Think


              1I used to think
              2The mind essential in the body, even
              3As stood the body essential in the mind:
              4Two inseparable things, by nature equal
              5And similar, and in creation's song
              6Halving the total scale: it is not so.
              7Unlike and cross like driftwood sticks they come
              8Churned in the giddy trough: a chunk of pine,
              9A slab of rosewood: mangled each on each
            10With knocks and friction, or in deadly pain
            11Sheathing each other's splinters: till at last
            12Without all stuff or shape they 're jetted up
            13Where in the bluish moisture rot whate'er
            14Was vomited in horror from the sea.

Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: The Poems of Trumbull Stickney, ed. George Cabot Lodge, William Vaughn Moody, and John Ellerton Lodge (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905): 309 (no. I of XVII -- "Dramatic Fragments" -- among all the "Fragments"). PS 3537 T525 1905 Robarts Library.
First publication date: 1905
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1998.
Recent editing: 2:2002/3/14

Composition date: 1904
Rhyme: unrhyming

Other poems by Trumbull Stickney

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