Song (Stickney version)

This brief, devastating poem asks whether it is better to have loved deeply and lost, or never to have loved at all. Written by Trumbull Stickney in the early 1900s, it meditates on the transience of beauty and the particular grief of cherishing things that must fade. The speaker wrestles with the fear that loving anything intensely means eventually confronting its absence. What makes this poem endure is its refusal to offer easy consolation: Stickney writes with a controlled, aching precision that feels almost like a confession whispered in the dark. The final lines carry the weight of someone who has already begun to mourn what he still possesses. It is a small poem, barely a breath, but it captures something essential about the human condition: that we cannot love without knowing we will lose.