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: