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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inELH Vol. 90; no. 3; pp. 799 - 825
Main Author Pollak, Zoë
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2023
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Summary: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. For Tuckerman to end a sonnet not with a wilted flower but rather with the "offal-heap" into which that flower gets tossed is as genre-bending as would be a hypothetical Shakespearian comedy if the play continued past the point of the wedding to document the marriage's decay (SP, II: In this essay I have two aims: I first contend that by training us to dignify portions of the natural environment we routinely avoid, Tuckerman—himself overlooked in the poetic canon—expands the conceptual, formal, and ethical capacities of the nineteenth-century anglophone sonnet. A number of critics writing on environmental literature advocate for developing what Margaret Ronda refers to as "an essentially observational and mimetic ethos" out of a desire to decrease the gap between world and word by fusing the aesthetic creations they study with the organic environments the texts portray.6 The 2019 critical anthology Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, for instance, contains an entire section of essays that exhibit this romantic longing to get back to nature.
ISSN:0013-8304
1080-6547
1080-6547
DOI:10.1353/elh.2023.a907209