Explore the poem

The poem employs a conventional fourteen‑line structure, but notice its almost anarchic rhyme scheme and the way in which the sonnet form can barely contain the image‑rich emotional volatility of the work. This is an unsettling, haunting poem. The world appears disjointed and dislocated. There is an almost filmic quality to the opening, when we immediately find ourselves in a ‘darkened house’ in an ‘upper chamber’ and learn about a boy who experienced ‘Terror and anguish’. Inevitably, the reference to an upper chamber prompts thoughts of the Passion of Christ and the place where Christ spent his last evening before his death.

It is autumn, and yet the grass is green. The narrator is transfixed. Is he looking at himself in the third person past? Is this some reaction to a terrible trauma, or some disturbing hallucination? Even the ‘swooning of the heart’, often a sign of happy romantic love, is seen in this context as evidence of disorientation.

The ending of the sonnet offers no explanation as to what is happening. The soft, delicate petals of the mountain ash, looking like tiny snowflakes, are said to be ‘shattered’ on the roof.

About Frederick Tuckerman

Frederick Tuckerman’s beloved wife died in childbirth, and a powerful sense of grief and loss permeates many of his poems. He was a poet of the outdoors, spending much time wandering through the woods and fields of New England, and becoming an expert on flora and fauna. Although he had a law degree from Harvard Law School, he abandoned the profession after a year and devoted himself to his other interests and, in particular, to literature and science.

On a trip to Europe, he developed a close friendship with the poet Alfred Tennyson, but whereas Tennyson was phenomenally successful, Tuckerman struggled to find any kind of readership for his sonnets, his lyrics and his longer poem ‘The Cricket’. His one collection, Poems, of 1860, was a commercial and critical failure, and it was only after his death that the complexity and originality of his work was appreciated.