Sensuous Waste in the Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

If asked to find a poem that ends with an image of the repellent or the grotesque, most of us would probably turn to a modernist anthology or to a 21^st-century chapbook. Yet writing alongside luminaries of the American Renaissance was a poet who depicted all varieties of natural waste and decay in his sonnets. Many of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman’s sonnets close with arresting portrayals of detritus and disintegration: the “molasses” tint of grasshopper effluvia; the shattered jaw of a horse; a berry’s blood-colored “spit.” But while his 1860 volume of poems was esteemed by icons like Emerson, Hawthorne, Tennyson, and Frost, Tuckerman’s name rarely appears on contemporary college syllabi. In fact, the majority of scholars specializing in 19^th-century American literature remain unfamiliar with his work.

This little-known poet was born in 1821 to a prosperous Boston family of professors, composers, and critics. Tuckerman attended Harvard alongside Thomas Wentworth Higginson and was mentored by the sonneteering mystic Jones Very. Because he did not need to earn a living, Tuckerman could afford to give up a career in law just one year into practicing. He chose instead to devote his days to literature, astronomy, and botany. In his 20s, the gentleman poet-naturalist moved to the small, leafy town of Greenfield and spent the rest of his life within 18 miles of Emily Dickinson.

Just before the onset of the Civil War, as Dickinson began replacing the exclamation points that end-stopped much of her early poetry with the trademark dashes that forestall resolution, Tuckerman published a series of Petrarchan-based sonnets whose closing lines are equally suspended. His formal poetics depart radically from those of his anglophone predecessors and contemporaries, the majority of whom allowed the prototypical sonnet’s logical structure to guide their poems from a scene-setting description or observation to an internal meditation, question, or pronouncement. Consider, for example, one of Charlotte Smith’s elegiac sonnets, which depicts the cycle of the seasons in order to conclude that human happiness, by contrast, has “no second spring.” Or take a sonnet of Wordsworth’s, which presents the image of a “humble” stream and develops the stream into a vehicle to reflect the speaker’s own currents of thought and memory.

Tuckerman reversed this trajectory. Rather than follow description with exposition or allegory, he regularly began his sonnets with broadly framed metaphysical questions and assertions, only to leave the reader with a graphic image of waste, one whose connection to the sonnet’s initial musings remains suggestively—and unnervingly—elusive. One such sonnet opens with a restless poet-speaker muttering to himself as he paces the contour of a shore. Its final lines deliver the reader to the face of a rock covered in bird droppings:

Sometimes I walk where the deep water dipsAgainst the land. Or on where fancy drivesI walk & muse aloud, like one who strivesTo tell his half shap’d thought with stumbling lips;And view the ocean sea, the ocean ships,With joyless heart: still, but myself I find,And restless phantoms of my restless mind;Only the moaning of my wandering words,Only the wailing of the wheeling plover.And this high Rock, beneath whose base the seaHas worm’d long caverns, like my tears in me:    And hard like this I stand, & beaten & blind    This desolate rock with lichens rusted over    Hoar with salt sleet, & chalkings of the birds.

To reserve a sonnet’s closing lines for a depiction of shit—to speak plainly—is unconventional. Granted, Tuckerman sanitizes the birds’ excrement by portraying it as “chalkings.” Yet the precision with which Tuckerman’s euphemism captures the guano’s tint and texture on the rock is immersive and even beautiful; it is almost as if the droppings form artistic creations within the sonnet as well as part of the poet’s own medium. What is the reader supposed to feel upon encountering such a tangible canvas?

Tuckerman’s dense coats of description—the russet blooms of lichen, the encrusted salt, the...