Chapter VI: The Poems

Many paragraphs in _Nature_ and the _Essays_ struggle in their prose environment as if seeking a higher medium of expression. Emerson’s command of poetic materials was extraordinary, though it fails to justify the claims sometimes made for him. He could be wilfully careless in respect to technique. There are moments when no cacophonous combination terrifies him. Then will he say his say though the language creak.

He had published freely in ‘The Dial,’ where he met his own little audience, but when the question arose of putting his verses in the pretentious form of a book Emerson hesitated. Only after much deliberation, continued through four years, did he come finally to a decision.

His capital theme is Nature, ‘the inscrutable and mute.’ ‘Woodnotes,’ ‘Monadnock,’ ‘May-Day,’ ‘My Garden,’ ‘Sea-Shore,’ ‘Song of Nature,’ ‘Nature,’ ‘The Snow Storm,’ ‘Waldeinsamkeit,’ ‘Musketaquit,’ ‘The Adirondacs,’ are varied renderings of the subject. Among the lines which haunt the memory, take for example this description of the sea:--

The opaline, the plentiful and strong,
Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,

* * * * *

Purger of earth, and medicine of men;
Creating a sweet climate by my breath,
Washing out harms and griefs from memory,
And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,
Giving a hint of that which changes not.

Splendid imagery and rich coloring mark the fine passages in ‘May-Day’ describing the advance of summer:--

As poured the flood of the ancient sea
Spilling over mountain chains,
Bending forests as bends the sedge,
Faster flowing o’er the plains,--
A world-wide wave with a foaming edge
That rims the running silver sheet,--
So pours the deluge of the heat
Broad northward o’er the land,
Painting artless paradises,
Drugging herbs with Syrian spices,
Fanning secret fires which glow
In columbine and clover-blow,

* * * * *

The million-handed sculptor moulds
Quaintest bud and blossom folds,
The million-handed painter pours
Opal hues and purple dye;
Azaleas flush the island floors,
And the tints of heaven reply.

Leaving to one side the mere external shows of the world, and calling in science to aid imagination, the poet strikes out stanzas like these from the ‘Song of Nature:’--

I wrote the past in characters
Of rock and fire the scroll,
The building in the coral sea,
The planting of the coal.

And thefts from satellites and rings
And broken stars I drew,
And out of spent and aged things
I formed the world anew;

What time the gods kept carnival,
Tricked out in star and flower,
And in cramp elf and saurian forms
They swathed their too much power.

‘Hamatreya,’ the exquisite ‘Rhodora,’ and the musical allegory ‘Two Rivers’ are important as showing the part played by Nature in Emerson’s verse.

Certain poems repeat (or anticipate) the ideas of the essays. ‘Brahma,’ for example, is an incomparable setting of the doctrine of the universal soul or ground of all things:--

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

‘The Sphinx’ announces, in a sphinx-like manner it must be acknowledged, though with rare beauty in individual lines, the doctrine of man’s relation to all existences, comprehending one phase of which man has the key to the whole. ‘Uriel’ is a declaration of the poet’s faith in good out of evil. ‘The Problem’ teaches the imminence of the Infinite:--

The hand that rounded Peter’s dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;--
The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Rich in thought and abounding in genuine poetic gold are ‘The World-Soul,’ ‘The Visit,’ ‘Destiny,’ ‘Days’ (Emerson’s perfect poem), ‘Forerunners,’ ‘Xenophanes,’ ‘The Day’s Ration,’ and the ‘Ode to Beauty.’

‘Merlin’ and ‘Saadi’ treat of the poet and his mission. The one is a protest against the tinkling rhyme, an art without substance; the other exalts the calling of the bard, but warns him that while he has need of men and they of him, the true poet dwells alone. Together with these suggestive verses should be read the posthumous fragment originally intended for a masque.[23]

Of his occasional and patriotic poems the ‘Concord Hymn,’ sung at the dedication of the battle monument in 1837, must be held an imperishable part of our young literature. The winged words of the first stanza are among the not-to-be-forgotten things, and there is rare beauty in the second stanza:--

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

For the Concord celebration of 1857 Emerson wrote the ‘Ode’ beginning

O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;

and for the ‘Jubilee Concert’ in Music Hall, on the day Emancipation went into effect, the ‘Boston Hymn,’ with the bold stanzas:--

God said, I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.

Think ye I made this ball
A field of havoc and war,
Where tyrants great and tyrants small
Might harry the weak and poor?

The best of Emerson’s patriotic poems is the ‘Voluntaries,’ containing the often quoted and perfect lines:--

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,
The youth replies, _I can_.

The personal poems are ‘Good-Bye,’ ‘Terminus,’ ‘In Memoriam,’ ‘Dirge,’ and ‘Threnody.’ The last of the group is the poet’s lament for his first-born, the ‘hyacinthine boy’ of five years, who died in 1842. It is hardly worth the while to compare these exquisite verses with some other poem born of intense sorrow with a view to determining whether they are greater, or less. Their wondrous beauty is as palpable as it is unresembling.

Comparisons little befit Emerson the poet. His muse was wayward. Extreme eulogists do him injury by applying to him standards that were none of his. They forget how he said of himself that he was ‘not a poet, but a lover of poetry and poets, and merely serving as a writer, etc., in this empty America before the arrival of poets.’ For the extravagancies of the extremists the tempered admirers find themselves regularly lectured, as if they were children who must have it explained to them that Emerson was not a Keats or a Shelley, or a Hugo.

Emerson as frequently gets less than he deserves as more. What niggardly praise is that from the pen of an eminent living English man of letters who can only suppose that Emerson ‘knew what he was about when he wandered into the fairyland of verse, and that in such moments _he found nothing better to his hand_!’ But the ‘Threnody,’ ‘Monadnock,’ ‘May-Day,’ ‘Voluntaries,’ and ‘The Problem,’ whatever else may be true of them, are not the work of a man who found nothing better to his hand.