Poem of the Day: ‘Under the mountain’

During his lifetime, the American poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873) was read by practically no one. His literary career makes that of the eccentric eighteenth-century English poet Stephen Duck, whose “On Mites” appeared as Poem of the Day in October 2022, look like a blaze of glory. At least people made fun of Stephen Duck. Poor Tuckerman was simply ignored.

Of the many writers to whom he sent his “Poems,” published in 1860, only Nathaniel Hawthorne bothered to respond with any encouragement or understanding of Tuckerman’s art. His later poems languished in obscurity into the next century. The 20th-century critic and poet Yvor Winters (the Sun can hardly turn around lately without bumping into him) championed Tuckerman’s “The Cricket” as “one of the finest lyrics in English of the nineteenth century.” Yet even Winters tempered his praise by also dismissing Tuckerman as a Romantic and therefore a fool. Tuckerman’s cardinal sin as a Romantic, on display in today’s Poem of the Day? “He dismisses feeling from motive as far as possible.”

Well, okay. It’s true that we are never told the backstory in today’s Poem of the Day, Tuckerman’s innovative “Sonnet XVI,” which begins “Under the mountain, as when first I knew.” We don’t know how or why the speaker has returned to a ruined house, with its darkling atmosphere of ghosts. We don’t know which he loved among the “soft-eyed sisters” he mentions, or why the mother pursed her lips as she sewed. We’re simply dropped into this scene with its intensity of feeling: the happier memory juxtaposed with the present desolation — in which, as the speaker notes, beauties of a different, wilder kind have flourished.

Meanwhile, the formal irregularity (for which some of Tuckerman’s few literary readers chided him) contributes to the poem’s drama. The interlaced rhymes, with their rhyme scheme of abbacbcdebdfef, departing from the standard abbaabbacdecde model of the Petrarchan sonnet, and so seem to echo the intrusion of wild things into the house’s old order. Even the final line, a tetrameter departure from the sonnet’s iambic pentameter, rings the poem’s closure as clearly as window glass dropping and breaking on stone.