FullReads

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.