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Title: A Forgotten American Poet
Author: Walter Prichard Eaton [
More Titles by Eaton]
I have written the title, "A forgotten American poet," and I shall let it stand, though I am not sure that he was ever well enough known to be spoken of now as forgotten. Ten or a dozen years ago a friend of mine who was working on an anthology of American poetry, at the John Carter Brown library in Providence, wrote to me with great enthusiasm of a poet he had "discovered," and of whom he had never heard before. "His name is Frederick Goddard Tuckerman," my friend said, "and you will not find him in Stedman's anthology, though it seems incredible that Stedman left out anybody or anything. Get a copy of his poems if you can--Ticknor and Fields, 1860."
I sent in my order for the book, to Goodspeed's, and then forgot the incident. But Goodspeed didn't. A year later the book came. Evidently it is an infrequent item at the auctions. The copy I received was a second edition, dated 1864 (which seems to indicate the poems had found some readers), but still in the familiar brown of Ticknor and Fields, matching my first American editions of _The Angel in the House_. This copy was of special interest because it was a presentation copy from the author to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The leaves had been opened, but if Mrs. Stowe read, she had made no marginal comments. The only addition to the book was an old newspaper clipping pasted in the back--a condensed history of the Beecher family! I read the volume myself with increasing interest and enthusiasm, and at the close I desired to learn more of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, not of the Beechers. Mr. Stedman's complete omission of these poems could only have been explained, I felt, by an equally complete ignorance of their existence. Compared to the poems of Henry T. Tuckerman, included by Stedman, the verses of his unknown cousin were as gold to copper. Why, I wondered, had this man been so completely obliterated by Time, or why had he failed in his life to reach a niche where Time could not utterly efface him?
I wrote to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, I discovered, had been a classmate of Tuckerman's at Harvard, and who of course knew practically everybody of consequence in the literary world of his generation. Colonel Higginson was able to supply some data, but not much. Tuckerman was born in 1821, of a rather well-known Boston family. Joseph Tuckerman, philanthropist and early Unitarian clergyman, was his uncle. He was a younger brother of Edward Tuckerman, long famous as a professor of botany at Amherst College, and who gave his name to Tuckerman's Ravine on Mount Washington. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman entered Harvard with the class of 1841, but remained only a year, passing over to the Law School a little later where he secured his LL.B. in 1842, and for a period evidently practised law in Boston. "I remember he came back among us at some kind of gathering during our college course," Colonel Higginson wrote, "and seemed very friendly and cordial to all. I remember him as a refined and gentlemanly fellow, but did not then know him as a poet. I see him put down as a lawyer in Boston (in Adams's _Dictionary of American Authors_), but I have no recollection of that fact."
It was not until I had written and published in the _Forum_ magazine a little appreciation of his poetry that I learned from his son, now a resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, that Frederick Tuckerman, even as his verses seemed to imply, early moved away from cities to the beautiful valley under the shadow of the Holyoke Range, and there passed his days, evidently the world forgetting, and by the world forgot. He issued his single volume of poems in 1860, when he was thirty-nine, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, but no shadow of that coming contest crosses their pages, as it crossed the pages of Whittier and Emerson, or as it affected the active life of his classmate Colonel Higginson. The second edition, in 1864, was still unaffected by the great struggle. He produced his slender sheaf of poems amid the fields, in quiet introspection, and he might well be accused of a species of Pharisaism, were these poems not so artlessly and passionately sincere, and often so tinged with religious awe. His withdrawal, in his verse, from the life of his times was the act of a natural recluse.
At the time Tuckerman's poems were issued, it is interesting to consider briefly some of the poetic influences which affected the public. The two best-selling poets just then, even in America, were Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, the latter represented, of course, by _The Angel in the House_. Indeed, the poems of these two sold better than novels! Whitman was hardly yet an influence. Julia Ward Howe had written, and Booth had accepted, a drama in blank verse. Our minor poets still wrote in the style of Pope, and the narrative shared honors with the moral platitude in popular regard. Tennyson, of course, was a great poet, and Patmore no mean one, even at that time, but it is questionable whether the huge popular success of their works, such as _The Princess_ and _The Angel in the House_, was due to their strictly poetic merits. At any rate, the poetry of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, lacking narrative interest, palatable platitudes, lyric lilt, but being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately minor and in many ways curiously modern, must have fallen on ears not attuned to it. He had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality of Whitman, to thrive and grow by the opposition he created. He could have aroused no opposition. It would have been his happy fate to find men and women who could appreciate his delicate observation of nature, his golden bursts of imaginative vigor, his wistful, contemplative melancholy, his disregard of academic form less because it hampered him than because he was careless of anything but the exact image. Such readers it was apparently not his fate to find in sufficient numbers to bring him fame. He was, in a sense, a modern before his time, but without sufficient consciousness of his modernity to fight. He was a mute, inglorious Robert Frost--like Frost for one year a Harvard student, like him retiring to the New England countryside, like him intent chiefly on rendering the commonplace beauty of that countryside into something magical because so true. Only he lacked Frost's dramatic sense, and interest in human problems.
Tuckerman's favorite medium was the sonnet; but a sonnet to him was a thing of fourteen five-foot iambic lines, and there all rules ended. Sometimes he even crowded six feet into a line. It is possible his laxness of form was due to ignorance, but more likely that it was due to a greater interest in his mood than in the "rules" of poetry. Many of his sonnets were in sequence, one flowing into the next. Here are two, thus unified, which show in flashes his sweep of imaginative phrase, and his transcendental bent:
The starry flower, the flower-like stars that fade
And brighten with the daylight and the dark--
The bluet in the green I faintly mark,
The glimmering crags with laurel overlaid,
Even to the Lord of light, the Lamp of shade,
Shine one to me--the least, still glorious made
As crowned moon or heaven's great hierarch.
And so, dim grassy flower and night-lit spark,
Still move me on and upward for the True;
Seeking through change, growth, death, in new and old
The full in few, the statelier in the less,
With patient pain; always remembering this--
His hand, who touched the sod with showers of gold,
Stippled Orion on the midnight blue.
And so, as this great sphere (now turning slow
Up to the light from that abyss of stars,
Now wheeling into gloom through sunset bars)
With all its elements of form and flow,
And life in life, where crown'd yet blind must go
The sensible king--is but a Unity
Compressed of motes impossible to know;
Which worldlike yet in deep analogy
Have distance, march, dimension and degree;
So the round earth--which we the world do call--
Is but a grain in that which mightiest swells,
Whereof the stars of light are particles,
As ultimate atoms of one infinite Ball
On which God moves, and treads beneath His feet the All!
Turning the page we come on a poem called _The Question_. "How shall I array my love?" he asks, and ranges the earth for costly jewels and silks from Samarcand; but because his love is a simple New England maid, he rejects them all as unworthy and inappropriate, and closing sings:
The river-riches of the sphere,
All that the dark sea-bottoms bear,
The wide earth's green convexity,
The inexhaustible blue sky,
Hold not a prize so proud, so high,
That it could grace her, gay or grand,
By garden-gale and rose-breath fanned;
Or as to-night I saw her stand,
Lovely in the meadow land,
With a clover in her hand.
Have not these lines a magic simplicity? It seems so to me. They flow rippling and bright to the inevitable finish, and there is no more to say.
Tuckerman's power of close yet magical observation, used not so much in the Tennysonian way (for Tennyson was a close observer, make no mistake about that) as in what we now think of as the modern way, that is, as a part of the realistic record of homely events, with beauty only as a by-product, is well illustrated in the opening lines of a narrative poem called _The School Girl, a New England Idyll_. Here again a kinship with Frost is seen, rather than with Tuckerman's contemporaries:
The wind, that all the day had scarcely clashed
The cornstalks in the sun, as the sun sank
Came rolling up the valley like a wave,
Broke in the beech and washed among the pine,
And ebbed to silence; but at the welcome sound--
Leaving my lazy book without a mark,
In hopes to lose among the blowing fern
The dregs of headache brought from yesternight,
And stepping lightly lest the children hear--
I from a side door slipped, and crossed a lane
With bitter Mayweed lined, and over a field
Snapping with grasshoppers, until I came
Down where an interrupted brook held way
Among the alders. There, on a strutting branch
Leaving my straw, I sat and wooed the west,
With breast and palms outspread as to a fire.
These powers of observation are again illustrated in a poem of quite different import, called _Margites_, a lyric of thirteen stanzas, some of which are inexcusably crude. It begins:
I neither plow the field nor sow,
Nor hold the spade nor drive the cart,
Nor spread the heap, nor hill nor hoe,
To keep the barren land in heart.
After four more stanzas in similar vein, comes this bit of magic word-painting, so instinct with our New England Autumn, yet so entirely the work of a realist, with his eye on the object:
But, leaning from my window, chief
I mark the Autumn's mellow signs--
The frosty air, the yellow leaf,
The ladder leaning on the vines.
The maple from his brood of boughs
Puts northward out a reddening limb;
The mist draws faintly round the house;
And all the headland heights are dim.
The poem then continues to its close:
And yet it is the same as when
I looked across the chestnut woods,
And saw the barren landscape then
O'er the red bunch of lilac buds;
And all things seem the same. 'Tis one
To lie in sleep, or toil as they
Who rise beforetime with the sun,
And so keep footstep with their day;
For aimless oaf and wiser fool
Work to one end by differing deeds;--
The weeds rot in the standing pool;
The water stagnates in the weeds;
And all by waste or warfare falls,
Has gone to wreck, or crumbling goes,
Since Nero planned his golden walls,
Or the Cham Cublai built his house.
But naught I reck of change and fray;
Watching the clouds at morning driven,
The still declension of the day;
And, when the moon is just in heaven,
I walk, unknowing where or why;
Or idly lie beneath the pine,
And bite the dry brown threads, and lie
And think a life well lost is mine.
"A life well lost"! The phrase is perhaps pathetically revealing--and prophetic. Or are we stretching the poet's ambitions to be known as a poet? That he published what he wrote indicates a normal desire for recognition, yet it can hardly be doubted, either, that he was an amateur in verse, whose life was rather centred in his contemplative, retiring existence among the fields and hills of Amherst. There may even seem to some a delicate Pharisaism about this sonnet, a Pharisaism removed from the robustness of Thoreau, who would certainly have argued the point with the farmer:
"That boy," the farmer said, with hazel wand
Pointing him out, half by the haycock hid,
"Though bare sixteen can work at what he's bid
From sun till set, to cradle, reap or band."
I heard the words, but scarce could understand
Whether they claimed a smile or gave me pain;
Or was it aught to me, in that green lane,
That all day yesterday, the briers amid,
He held the plough against the jarring land
Steady, or kept his place among the mowers;
Whilst other fingers, sweeping for the flowers,
Brought from the forest back a crimson stain?
Was it a thorn that touched the flesh? or did
The poke-berry spit purple on my hand?
Yet, as we have said, Tuckerman was far from Pharisaism of any sort, either of the aesthete or nature-lover. His mind was too genuinely occupied with spiritual problems. Take, for example, this closing sonnet in a sequence depicting the discords of Nature:
Not the round natural word, not the deep mind,
The reconcilement holds: the blue abyss
Collects it not; our arrows sink amiss;
And but in Him may we our import find.
The agony to know, the grief, the bliss
Of toil, is vain and vain! clots of the sod
Gathered in heat and haste, and flung behind,
To blind ourselves and others--what but this,
Still grasping dust and sowing toward the wind?
No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;
But leaving straining thought and stammering word
Across the barren azure pass to God;
Shooting the void in silence, like a bird--
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!
Here, surely, is poetry that would not seem the least among the myriad hosts in Mr. Stedman's hospitable anthology! The rhyme scheme may be quite unorthodox, but the poet's lips have been touched by a coal from the high altar, none the less.
The volume closes with a sonnet sequence which is poignantly intimate; almost it is a diary of the poet's grief for the loss of the woman he loved, and in its stabbing intensity holds a hint of such poems as Patmore's _The Azalea_. Here is one:
Again, again, ye part in stormy grief
From these bare hills and bowers so built in vain,
And lips and hearts that will not move again--
Pathetic Autumn and the writhled leaf;
Dropping away in tears with warning brief:
The wind reiterates a wailful strain,
And on the skylight beats the restless rain,
And vapour drowns the mountain, base and brow.
I watch the wet black roofs through mist defined,
I watch the raindrops strung along the blind,
And my heart bleeds, and all my senses bow
In grief; as one mild face, with suffering lined,
Comes up in thought: oh, wildly, rain and wind,
Mourn on! she sleeps, nor heeds your angry sorrow now.
Such use of pictorial observation as "the raindrops strung along the blind," and "the wet black roofs through mist defined," is something you will look for in vain through the pages of Longfellow, for instance. This is the sonnet of a realist. So, also, is this one, which does not seem to me to deserve oblivion, and certainly so long as my memory retains its power will have that little span of immortality:
My Anna! when for thee my head was bowed,
The circle of the world, sky, mountain, main,
Drew inward to one spot; and now again
Wide Nature narrows to the shell and shroud.
In the late dawn they will not be forgot,
And evenings early dark; when the low rain
Begins at nightfall, though no tempest rave,
I know the rain is falling on her grave;
The morning views it, and the sunset cloud
Points with a finger to that lonely spot;
The crops, that up the valley rolling go,
Ever toward her slumber bow and blow!
I look on the sweeping corn and the surging rye,
And with every gust of wind my heart goes by!
It must not be supposed that the predominant note in Tuckerman's poetry is elegiac; rather is it a note of tender, wistful, and scrupulously accurate contemplation of the New England countryside, mingled with spiritual speculation. But as the volume closed with the elegiac poems, and as thereafter no more poems were published, it may be surmised that the poet's will to create was smothered in the poignant ripple of his personal sorrow. Had it not been, and had his pen continued to write, one cannot help wondering how much closer he would have come to the modern note in poetry. That he already felt a tendency to progress from the old metres to freer forms is constantly apparent; and this tendency, combined with his unconsciously scrupulous realism, might well have brought him near to the present. I should like to close this little paper to his memory with one of his lyrics which throws over rhyme altogether, and strictly formal metre, also, though the fetters are still there. It is the stab of grief which comes through to haunt you, the bare simplicity and the woe. Objective it certainly is not, as the modernists maintain they are. Yet the personal note will always be modern, for it has no age. This lyric belongs to you and me to-day, not in the pages of a forgotten book, on the shelves of a dusty library. I would that some of our _vers libre_ practitioners could equal it:
I took from its glass a flower,
To lay on her grave with dull, accusing tears;
But the heart of the flower fell out as I handled the rose,
And my heart is shattered and soon will wither away.
I watch the changing shadows,
And the patch of windy sunshine upon the hill,
And the long blue woods; and a grief no tongue can tell
Breaks at my eyes in drops of bitter rain.
I hear her baby wagon,
And the little wheels go over my heart:
Oh! when will the light of the darkened house return?
Oh! when will she come who made the hills so fair?
I sit by the parlor window,
When twilight deepens and winds grow cold without;
But the blessed feet no more come up the walk,
And my little girl and I cry softly together.
[The end]
Walter Prichard Eaton's essay: A Forgotten American Poet
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