"Gardens of Decay": Decomposing Nature in Frederick Goddard Tuckerman's American Sonnets

Abstract

"Gardens of Decay"Decomposing Nature in Frederick Goddard Tuckerman's American Sonnets Zoë Pollak Yet in such waste, no waste the soul descries …For whoso waiteth, long & patiently,Will see a movement stirring at his feet —Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Sonnet V:II1 i. wasted aesthetics One of the most gnomic moments in Ecclesiastes occurs at its end, when the book's final poem aligns the waning of life with a series of collapsing forms. Recall the Creator before your own frame fails, the speaker implores, foretelling the day when "the keepers of the house shall tremble" and "the daughters of musick shall be brought low," the "silver cord" will "be loosed" and the "golden bowl" will "be broken," and dust shall return to the earth.2 Within this catalogue of degeneration, Ecclesiastes presents an image of a grasshopper that "shall be a burden" as our "years draw nigh."3 What makes this grasshopper distressing to behold as we consider our mortality? Does its body pose an encumbrance to itself as it ages, or does its hardy exoskeleton and plague-worthy numbers underscore our human frailty by contrast? Over two thousand years after these lines were written, a Massachusetts poet steeped in Ecclesiastes invoked an equally enigmatic grasshopper to portray decline across species. In Frederick Goddard Tuckerman's Civil War-era sonnet, the speaker recalls his childhood "when, our schoolday done," he "hunted" for insects in late fall and found only the dregs of the season: "Tatter'd & dim, the last red butterfly" and "the old grasshopper molasses-mouth'd" (SP, III:IV, 120). Tuckerman's images, poignant in their ability to evoke color and sweetness amidst autumn's senescence, comprise the sonnet's final lines. But while they gesture toward ebbing, these last phrases are [End Page 799] disarmingly open-ended. The evocatively euphemistic "molasses-mouth'd" refers to survival: namely, to the brown regurgitations grasshoppers produce to defend themselves against predators. How many modernist or contemporary sonnets, let alone sonnets written in the nineteenth century, conclude abruptly on depictions of vomit? To end a sonnet on a subject as unpalatable as biological waste without providing readers with any kind of tempering allegorical framework was unprecedented in Tuckerman's day. Yet his five-part series, the first two of which he self-published in an 1860 volume called Poems, abounds with sonsnets that begin with metaphysical abstractions and psychic dilemmas and stop unexpectedly on images of effluvia, spoilage, and decay. One sonnet, for example, starts with the speaker recounting the way he walks along the shore to face the "restless phantoms of my restless mind," and leaves off with a description of a "desolate rock with lichen rusted over, / Hoar with salt sleet, & chalkings of the birds" (SP, III:X, 123). Another sonnet muses on how "old associations" between lovers "rarely slip," and ends suggestively on a masticated stem of grass "not to be put back, / Or swallow'd in, but sputter'd from the lip!" (SP, V:X, 137). Yet another deposits readers in front of the "Blackness and scalding stench" of "a smouldering pit" left in the wake of a fire (SP, II:III, 100). Closing lines like these are frequently the most immersive and tactile portions of Tuckerman's sonnets, but without a concluding figurative or philosophical turn, it is hard to know how to interpret them. Tuckerman's imagistic final lines resist conforming to the logical architecture of the prototypical Petrarchan sonnet. Rather than finish on reflection, his sonnets hone in on perception. Endings like the ones I have cited above engage multiple senses. They saturate readers in the poems' immediate environments when most sonnets would prompt philosophical remove. Tuckerman's swerves from rumination to sensory inundation are striking in and of themselves, but his closure-resisting reversals in sequence are made even more counterintuitive by the fact that these conclusions point toward literal endings. In other words, the very images that thwart reflection by steeping the senses (disintegrating plant matter, for instance, or the waste product that marks the completion of a biological process) gesture to cessation. Tuckerman's choice to halt these sonnets on subjects that accompany termination leaves them paradoxically—and pointedly...