Lizette Woodworth Reese, born in Maryland in 1856, taught English in Baltimore public schools for decades while publishing lyric poetry rooted in village and garden life. Her sonnet “Tankle-Tinkle-Tank” comes from that late-nineteenth-century tradition of formal verse, but its emotional directness keeps it from feeling remote. The poem turns on a simple evening scene: a rector watching from an attic window as cows move through the village toward the barn. Yet the real subject is not the landscape but the way grief clings to ordinary sights and sounds.
The first eight lines build that landscape through precise, luminous detail. The rector’s attic window is “a light, / Set high on shelf for all the folk to see.” The garden is “windy-dim,” filled with tall irises, “some purple and some white.” A neighbor’s pane holds “one pane clearly red,” and a weather vane becomes “a rosy flare.” These images are not only visual; they carry a quality of almost sacred attention. The air is “exquisite,” and the cows are “milk-heavy, slow,” moving “tankling-tinkling to the shed.” The invented verb “tankling-tinkling” is central: it makes the sound of cowbells both musical and oddly childlike, as if the village itself were speaking in a nursery rhyme. The octave’s rhyme scheme, ABBA CDDC, holds these details in a tight, almost enclosed shape, while the iambic pentameter gives the lines a steady, processional motion.
The turn arrives sharply in the ninth line: “Lost loveliness is broken down the wind; / Lost laughters fleet along the blur of wall.” The repetition of “lost” opens the poem’s deeper subject, not the pretty village but what memory does to it. The cows appear again, “tankling to the barnyard near,” but now the sound is inseparable from something vanishing. The final tercet completes the turn: through tears, the rector sees “his little daughter, dead this many a year.” The “cloudy-pale, the shaken flowers behind” become an image of fragile beauty haunted by absence. The phrase “dead this many a year” has an archaic, ballad-like simplicity that makes the grief feel both private and timeless.
The sonnet’s construction reinforces that meaning. The octave establishes a visible world; the sestet, rhymed EFG EFG, loosens the pattern and lets feeling break through. The repeated cowbell line acts like a refrain, first as sound in the present, then as sound across the years. “Tankle-tinkle-tank” begins as a child’s approximation of a bell and ends as an elegy for a child. The rhythm stays mostly iambic, but compounded adjectives like “milk-heavy, slow” and “cloudy-pale, the shaken flowers” slow the line, asking the reader to dwell on each image. Reese’s alliteration and assonance—wind and wall, laughters and blur, falling and flowers—make the sestet feel like a quiet incantation.
What makes the poem significant is its compression. In fourteen lines, Reese moves from an external description of a village evening to an intimate revelation of mourning. The rector’s attic window, “set high on shelf,” at first seems a vantage of calm authority; by the end, it is the place from which a father watches the ordinary world while carrying an unbearable loss. The poem refuses to separate beauty from sorrow. The “exquisite air” and the cows’ “tankling-tinkling” are not consolations that cancel grief; they are the very medium through which grief returns. That is why the title, with its homemade musicality, is not whimsical decoration but the heart of the poem: a sound from the present that keeps arriving from the past.