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 æsthete 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!