I hear a river thro' the valley wander
 Whose water runs, the song alone remaining.
 A rainbow stands and summer passes under.

An exquisite little poem that needs no explanation. The juxtaposition of images is especially nice - the river and the summer reinforcing both on the metaphor and the image level - as is the pleasing regularity of the verse (something imagists¹, for instance, often neglect).

Biography

Notes on Life and Works

Joseph Trumbull Stickney was born in Geneva on June 20, 1874, and grew up (to a height of six feet four inches) as his parents travelled widely … Wiesbaden, Florence, Nice, London, and New York. After being educated by his father Austin at home in Latin and Greek, Trumbull entered Harvard University in 1891. He graduated magna cum laude in June 1895.

The following eight years were spent studying for the degree of Doctorat ès Lettres at the Sorbonne in Paris. For this he wrote two theses, one on the letters of Ermolao Barbaro, a 15th-century ambassador to Rome, and the other on aphorisms in Greek verse. His Dramatic Verses was published in Boston in 1902, dedicated from Paris to his friend “Bay” (George) Lodge, who would co-edit Stickney’s collected poems in 1905.

In 1903 his second thesis was published as Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grècque: this won him the first Sorbonne Doctorat awarded to an American. Stickney then took on a position as instructor in Greek at Harvard in 1903 and travelled abroad in Greece from April to June that year. A brain tumor caused headaches and partial blindness from early in 1904 and led to his death in Boston on Oct. 11. He is buried in Hartford, Connecticut. For his biography, see Homage to Trumbull Stickney: Poems, edited by James Reeves and Seán Haldane (London: Heinemann, 1968), pp. 1-16 (New York Public Library shelfmark D-18-2147).

– Representative Poetry Online

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/authors/stickney.html

Links

Variations on a Fragment by Trumbull Stickney (John Hollander): Not a parody (for those of you who remember the Williams variations²), but a nice set of variations on the theme.

http://www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/95_96/hollande.html

Random association: The last line reminds me of AE’s stars ‘dancing over the mountains’ - see poem #350

— Martin