Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821-1873)
“Tuckerman was one of the three most remarkable American poets of the nineteenth century,” wrote American poet and literary critic, Yvor Winters, in the Forward to Tuckerman’s Complete Poems (1965). Winters ranks Tuckerman with Emily Dickinson and Jones Very, but higher than Emerson, Whitman, Poe and Bryant.
Tuckerman was born in Boston, on Beacon Street, attended Harvard and Harvard Law, passed the Bar, but never practiced law. His brother, Edward, was the Amherst College botanist after whom Tuckerman’s Ravine at the base of Mount Washington was named. Their father, a Boston merchant, left his heirs a sizable inheritance, but instead of living a fancy lifestyle, Frederick lived in relative solitude. In 1847, he moved to Greenfield in western Massachusetts.
As a poet, he is compared by critics with French symbolists, and, so stands against the Romantics of his time. He trained himself as a keep observer of Nature, and, his poems exemplify his passion for the details of the natural world. He traveled to Europe, where he became friends with Tennyson. And, after finishing his only collection of poems, in 1860, he sent them to the biggest names in poetry of the time and received rave reviews: “I have read the volume of poems,” wrote Hawthorne, “and think it is a remarkable one.” He was known for his sonnets, each with beautiful and accurate imagery from nature:
XXVI
“For Nature daily through her grand design
Breathes contradiction where she seems most clear,
For I have held of her the gift to hear
And felt indeed endowed of sense divine
When I have found by guarded insight fine,
Cold April flowers in the green end of June,
And thought myself possessed of Nature’s ear
When by the lonely mill-brook into mine,
Seated on slab or trunk asunder sawn,
The night-hawk blew his horn at summer noon;
And in the rainy midnight I have heard
The ground sparrow’s long twitter from the pine,
And the catbird’s silver song, the wakeful bird
That to the lighted window sings for dawn.”
His most famous poem, “The Cricket,” a longer poem, is considered by some to be the greatest poem of the nineteenth century.
I
The humming bee purrs softly o'er his flower,
From lawn and thicket
The dogday locust singeth in the sun,
From hour to hour;
Each has his bard, and thou, ere day be done
Shalt have no wrong;
So bright that murmur mid the insect crowd
Muffled and lost in bottom grass, or loud
By pale and picket:
Shall I not take to help me in my song
A little cooing cricket?
II
The afternoon is sleepy!, let us lie
Beneath these branches, whilst the burdened brook
Muttering and moaning to himself goes by,
And mark our minstrel’s carol, whilst we look
Toward the faint horizon, swooning-blue.
Or in a garden bower
Trellised and trammeled with deep drapery
Of hanging green;
Light glimmering through:—
There let the dull hop be
Let bloom, with poppy’s dark refreshing flower;
Let the dead fragrance round our temples beat,
Stunning the sense to slumber; whilst between
The falling water and fluttering wind
Mingle and meet
Murmur and mix,
No few faint pipings from the glades behind,
Or alder-thicks;
But louder as the day declines,
From tingling tassel blade and sheath,
Rising from nets of river-vines
Winrows and ricks,
Above, beneath,
At every breath:—
At hand, around, illimitably
Rising and falling like the sea,
Acres of cricks!
III
Dear to the child who hears thy rustling voice
Cease at his footstep, though he hears thee still,
Cease and resume, with vibrance crisp and shrill,
Thou sittest in the sunshine to rejoice!;
Night lover too; bringer of all things dark,
And rest and silence; yet thou bringest to me
Always that burthen of the unresting sea
The moaning cliffs, the low rocks blackly stark;
These upland inland fields no more I view,
But the long flat seaside beach, the wild seamew,
And the overturning wave!
Thou bringest too, dim accents from the grave
To him who walketh when the day is dim,
Dreaming of those who dream no more of him—
With edg’d remembrances of joy and pain:
And heyday looks and laughter come again;
Forms that in happy sunshine lie and leap,
With faces where but now a gap must be
Renunciations, and partitions deep,
And perfect tears, and crowning vacancy!
And to thy poet at the twilights hush
No chirping touch of lips with tittering blush,
But wringing arms, hearts wild with love and wo
Closed eyes, and kisses that would not let go.
IV
So wert thou loved in that old graceful time
When Greece was fair,
While god and hero hearkened to thy chime
Softly astir
Where the long grasses fringed Caÿster’s lip—
Long-drawn, with shimmering sails of swan and ship
And ship and swan—
Or where
Reedy Eurotas ran.
Did that low warble teach they tender flute,
Xenaphyle?
Its breathings mild? say! did the grasshopper
Sit golden in thy purple hair
O Psammathe?
Or wert thou mute
Grieving for Pan amid the alders there?
And by the water and along the hill
That thirsty tinkle in the herbage still,
Though the lost forest wailed to horns of Arcady?
Like the Enchanter old—
V
Who sought mid the dead water’s weeds and scum
For evil growths beneath the moonbeam cold,
Or mandrake, or dorcynium;
And touched the leaf that opened both his ears
So that articulate voices now he hears
In cry of beast or bird or insect’s hum—
Might I but find thy knowledge in thy song!
That twittering tongue
Ancient as light, returning like the years.
So might I be
Unwise to sing, thy true interpreter
Thro denser stillness and in sounder dark
Than ere thy notes have pierced to harrow me,
So might I stir
The world to hark
To thee my lord and lawgiver
And cease my quest,
Content to bring thy wisdom to the world
Content to gain at last some low applause
Now low, now lost
Like thine from mossy stone amid the stems and straws
Or garden-grave mound tricked and drest—
Powdered and pearled
By stealing frost—
In dusky rainbow-beauty of euphorbias!
For larger would be less indeed, and like
The ceaseless simmer in the summer grass
To him who toileth in the windy field,
Or where the sunbeams strike
Naught in innumerable numerousness.
So might I much possess
So much must yield.
But failing this, the dell and grassy dike
The water and the waste shall still be dear
And all the pleasant plots and places
Where thou hast sung and I have hung
To ignorantly hear.—
Then cricket sing thy song, or answer mine
Thine whispers blame, but mine has naught but praises
It matters not.—Behold the autumn goes,
The Shadow grows,
The moments take hold of eternity;
Even while we stop to wrangle or repine
Our lives are gone
Like thinnest mist,
Like yon escaping colour in the tree:—
Rejoice! rejoice! whilst yet the hours exist
Rejoice or mourn, and let the world swing on
Unmoved by Cricket-song of thee or me.