Lived reclusively following wife’s death.
I’m reading the paragraph on Frederick Goddard Tuckerman at the end of the Library of America’s American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 2. Only book (Poems) self-published in 1860. “[R]ecognised as authority on local flora.”
Tuckerman wrote five sonnet sequences, unpublished until 1931, that I liked quite a bit more than the greatest poem of the nineteenth century, “The Cricket.” They were all written in the 1850s and 1860s, and are grief-ridden. To what extent they are “genuine” expressions of grief, I would not want to say. The formality of the sonnet sequence seems like a poor choice for a spontaneous outpouring of emotion, but Tuckerman may have thought otherwise.
The sonnets are packed with extraordinary images drawn from nature. Tuckerman does not write sonnets describing bird nests and eggs like John Clare, but he seems more interested in nature for its own sake than, say, William Wordsworth. Thus:
[Sins] That hedge me in and press about my path
Like purple-poison flowers of stramony
With their dull opiate breath and dragon wings. (I.iv.)
Or:
And hard like this I stand, and beaten and blind,
This desolate rock with lichens rusted over,
Hoar with salt-sleet and chalkings of the birds. (III.x.)
Or, one I find amazing:
Nor can I drop my lids nor shade my brows,
But there he stands beside the lifted sash;
And with a swooning of the heart, I think
Where the black shingles slope to meet the boughs
And, shattered on the roof like smallest snows,
The tiny petals of the mountain ash. (I.x.)
The sonnets are full of crickets, too. The cricket had some personal meaning to Tuckerman that his poems only partly communicate. One might fairly ask what any of these passages mean. The perfectly observed detail gives us – what? Yvor Winters suggests that the “general intention” is all that is really knowable: “somehow the sensory details express the sickness of the man; the tiny details are the items on which he can concentrate; but that is all we know.” (xiii)
So this is how Winters links Tuckerman to his French contemporaries, to Verlaine and Rimbaud and, I would say, Tristan Corbière (joyous where Tuckerman is melancholy), poets who are actively, deliberately exploring the poetic uses of obscurity. These French poets were all, more or less, working in public. Tuckerman’s obscurities, like Emily Dickinson’s, may be perfectly clear to the poem’s author. Who knows. Tuckerman’s little 1860 book of poems is more clear, more conventional, and more dull than his unpublished poems.
What did he see in the tiny, shattered petals of the mountain ash?
Nor can I drop my lids nor shade my brows,
ReplyDeleteBut there he stands beside the lifted sash;
And with a swooning of the heart, I think
Where the black shingles slope to meet the boughs
And, shattered on the roof like smallest snows,
The tiny petals of the mountain ash.
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Hi WE, who does the "he" refer to? A grandfather, father, brother? Someone house bound? Sick? Dying?
Cheers.
Great question, The question of that poem. First, the whole sonnet:
ReplyDeleteAn upper chamber in a darkened house,
Where, ere his footsteps reached ripe manhood's brink,
Terror and anguish were his lot to drink;
I cannot rid the thought nor hold it close
But dimly dream upon that man alone:
Now though the autumn clouds most softly pass,
The cricket chides beneath the doorstep stone
And greener than the season grows the grass.
Nor can I drop my lids nor shade my brows,
But there he stands beside the lifted sash;
And with a swooning of the heart, I think
Where the black shingles slope to meet the boughs
And, shattered on the roof like smallest snows,
The tiny petals of the mountain ash.
Autumn + cricket + too green grass = death & a grave. Maybe. Or maybe "he" is the poet, a younger version? Or a double of some sort? A family member is a good guess. Earlier and later poems in the sequence are no help that I can see.
Yvor Winters: "There have been a few occasions when I almost thought that I udnerstood the grammar and syntax of this passage, but I do not understand them now."
How about: autumn (profound loss of someone dear) + cricket (a squeaking sign of life) + too green grass (not a narrow patch, but the whole lawn in front of the house?) = a solitary suffering recluse (“man alone”) who continues to tend to the yard and look out the window like Boo? A wild guess. The syntax tosses me at the transition from swooning heart to “I think.”
ReplyDeletePlausible! Since I've read more of Tuckerman, I'm stuck on "cricket as portent of death," but why does it have to mean the same thing from poem to poem. Yes, the cricket is alive, tenaciously so! And autumn is a time of beauty. It's an Indian Summer - all things must pass, but now is beautiful. Fallen petals are beautiful.
ReplyDeleteThe syntax at the end is off. Deliberate Modernist effect, 50 years before Modernism? Or inattention, a mistake?