Chapter VIII: The Poet

“_I am born a poet--of a low class without doubt, but a poet. That is my nature and vocation. My singing, to be sure, is very husky and is for the most part in prose. Still I am a poet in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondence between them._”

Emerson’s estimate of his poetical gifts was given in a letter to his future wife. When he so clearly points out his limitations, it seems ungracious to agree with his critical judgment, but one must do so. He was not a poet in the sense of a maker of mighty harmonies. He did not walk like Milton, with his “singing robes” about him. But he was a poet in the sense of being a perceiver and dear lover of natural harmonies, and he made us sharers of his perception.

His singing voice was certainly very husky. Only a few of his poems stand the test of being read aloud with perfect pleasure. Frequently we are conscious of a metrical jolt. Not only is the ear pained by dissonance, but there is a sense that the poetical inspiration has suddenly given out.

I am inclined to think that Emerson would have been happier if he had frankly adopted “free verse.” For though he was a poet, he was not a natural rhymster. In “Merlin” he makes a declaration of independence which would please our new poets.

“Great is the art
Great be the manners, of the bard.
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhythm and number.”

And then he weakens his declaration by adding:

“But, leaving rule and pale forethought,
He shall aye climb
For his rhyme.”

The critic is tempted to ask, Why not let the rhyme go rather than climb for it? Emerson’s rhymes were often most unhappy, and had the air of being forced into service.

Read his “May Day.” You will find jingling rhymes like

“Not for a regiment’s parade,
Nor evil laws or rulers made,
Blue Walden rolls its cannonade.”

We have such lines as these:

“Every tree and stem and chink
Gushed with syrup to the brink.
The air stole into the streets of towns,
Refreshed the wise, reformed the clowns.”

After these rhymes that are easy to a fault, we have others that are difficult: as _almanac_ and _coming-back_, _Superior Lake_ and _Mackinac_, _cavaliers_ and _travelers_. Sometimes an obsolete word is introduced for the sake of an imperfect rhyme:

“They shook the snow from hats and shoon,
They put their April raiment on.”

All this needs to be said at the beginning. It is when full allowance is made for his poetical lapses that we are prepared to appreciate Emerson’s real poetical gifts. While he had no power of sustained verbal melody, he has given an unusual number of perfect lines.

In “Voluntaries” we have a succession of commonplace verses, and then come upon the lines that seemed chiseled by some great artist, austerely beautiful and true:

“So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The Youth replies, I can.”

In “Forerunners” one would not change a word. There is a gladness of adventure.

“Each and All,” “The Problem,” “Days,” are sources of endless delight. In “Two Rivers,” Emerson expresses melodiously his poetical creed. He is a perceiver and dear lover of the correspondence between the outer and the inner worlds. The little river that runs through Concord is the symbol of the eternities.

“Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain,
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord plain.

“Thou in thy narrow bed art pent,
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament,
Through light, through life, it forward flows.”

In the longer poems, like “Monadnock” and “Woodnotes,” there is nothing consecutive. One might read them as Emerson himself was accustomed to read, beginning at the last page and turning back the leaves in search of a rewarding sentence. But there is a sparkling atmosphere and a sense of the New England woods and hills.

“’Twas one of the charmed days
When the genius of God doth flow,
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow.”

Emerson is the poet of nature, and it is nature as revealed in New England. We see the “twilight parks of beech and pine,” and the purple berries, the upland pastures, the delicate mosses, the granite ledges, over which the brooks go tumbling, the mountain lakes “edged with sand and grass,” the “damp fields known to bird and fox.” Nowhere is it far to the primitive granite, yet the land is not bare. Even on the ledges “the ropelike pine roots crosswise grown” give a homelike invitation. Nature is everywhere friendly, though there is a trace of austerity about her welcome.

But to the poet the outward forms of nature are but symbols.

“Give me truths,
For I am weary of surfaces,
And die of inanition.”

Flashing through woods and mountains and sky, he sees truths that strengthen and inspire. What he seeks to express in his poetry is

“... the sweet affluence of love and song,
The rich results of the divine consents
Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover.”

Every poet who has any distinctive quality and is not merely an imitator of other poets sees something which he wants to express. This insight is his real contribution. The skill with which he is able to communicate what he sees is another matter.

The poets of the most universal appeal are those who see what everybody else sees, only more intensely, and who can tell their story in words which every one understands. Robert Burns, Whittier, James Whitcomb Riley, need no interpreters. They themselves are interpreting what we have already experienced.

There are other poets whose endeavor is to make us see something which, without their help, we might miss, or at least treat as something unpoetical. Browning saw a greater complexity in human conduct and character than we usually recognize, and he sought to present this complexity to the imagination as well as to the reason. This involved a good deal of explanation on his part, and explanatory remarks are always prose. But the true Browning lover knows what his poet is driving at and helps him out when he gets into difficulties.

Walt Whitman saw the poetry which is in mere bulk and the sublimity that is in great bare spaces. Let others sing of the finished products of art and nature; he would celebrate the glory of the imperfect, the romance of the raw material. To his mind a catalogue of the most ordinary things was suggestive. It was the stuff poems are made of. It was an inventory of the wealth we hold in common. He repeats the names of American states and cities as Milton repeated the names of the places old in story, which in his imagination stood for all sorts of vague sublimities. If we catch something of this imaginative enthusiasm for crude bulk and wide spaces and overflowing vitality, then we greet Whitman as a great poet. Otherwise, we make nothing of him. “There are in the world,” says Paul, “many kinds of voices, and no voice is without its significance.” But he adds, if we do not understand the person who is talking, he is a barbarian to us and we are as barbarians to him.

The poetry of Emerson has a quality growing out of a peculiar way of looking at things. Whitman saw things in the rough. “Here is what moves in magnificent masses, careless of particulars.” Emerson saw the motion of masses, but he was not careless of particulars. His attention was fixed not upon the mass but on the particles of which it was composed. And his quick eye perceived that these particles had each a motion of its own, and that the motion was bewilderingly rapid.

Our dull eyes see results but not processes. We talk of the quickness of thought, but we are really very slow-witted creatures and seldom see what is going on. The things which we watch and talk about are really the things which have already happened, just as we may be looking at a star by light, which only tells us that it was shining some centuries ago. Our judgment on what we call current events is apt to be misleading because it is not strictly contemporaneous.

The great illusion is that of arrested motion. Things seem to us to stand still, which in reality are whirling about with inconceivable velocity. Our sciences have demonstrated what our senses can not perceive, and that which staggers our imagination.

The astronomer tells us of the way this earthen ball on which we live goes hurtling through space. But even the astronomer does not feel the motion. The chemist tells us of the wild dances of the molecules. We in a dull way perceive the fact of growth and decay and attraction and repulsion, but we do not perceive them as incessantly happening. When a powder mill is destroyed, we are startled by the explosion. But of the multitude of tiny explosions, which result in the opening of a rose, or the scattering of thistledown, we are unconscious.

Now Emerson was profoundly stirred by thought of the explosive power of nature. Indeed his world was always exploding. He attempts to express the sense of these sudden happenings in his poetry. He is preeminently the poet of swift motion.

“Hearken! Hearken!
If thou wouldst know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young.
Aloft, abroad, the pæan swells;
O wise man! hear’st thou half it tells?
O wise man! hear’st thou the least part?
’Tis the chronicle of art.
To the open air it sings
Sweet the genesis of things,
Of tendency through endless ages,
Of star dust, and star-pilgrimages,
Of rounded worlds, of space and time,
Of the old flood’s subsiding slime,
Of chemic matter, force and form,
Of poles and powers, cold, wet and warm:
The rushing metamorphosis
Dissolving all that fixture is,
Melts things that be to things that seem,
And solid nature to a dream.
O, listen to the undersong,
The ever old, the ever young;
And, far within the cadent pauses,
The chorus of the ancient Causes!”

This was the theme of Emerson’s poetry. It was the genesis of things as revealed by modern science and interpreted by the poetic imagination. He was the poet of the “rushing metamorphosis.”

It was a world in which there was persistent force and ever-changing form. The world soul cries,

“Hearken once more!
I will tell thee the mundane lore.
Older am I than thy numbers wot,
Change I may, but I pass not.
Hitherto all things fast abide,
And anchored in the tempest ride.
Trenchant Time behooves to hurry
All to yean and all to bury:
All the forms are fugitive,
But the substances survive.”

And that calm for which philosophers have always yearned, how shall we attain it? Not by standing still, seeking refuge in some venerable form, but by flinging ourselves into the swift current, and yielding ourselves to the eternal power.

It is possible for a man’s thought to keep step with nature “with triumphant piercing sight,” seeing the end toward which all things move.

“On him the light of star and moon
Shall fall with purer radiance down;
All constellations of the sky
Shed their virtue through his eye,
Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence;
The mounting sap, the shells, the sea,
All spheres, all stones his helpers be.
He shall never be old
Nor his fate shall be foretold;
He shall meet the speeding year
Without wailing, without fear.”

The Actual is swift, but the Ideal is swifter.

“Thee gliding through a sea of form,
Like the lightning through a storm,
Somewhat not to be possessed,
Somewhat not to be caressed,
No feet so fleet could ever find,
No perfect form could ever bind,
Thou eternal fugitive,
Hovering over all that live,
Quick and skilful to inspire
Sweet, extravagant desire.”

There are poems of Emerson which we can make nothing of unless we have happened to brood over the same problems. There is “Initial, Dæmonic and Celestial Love.” It is unreadable, unless one reads between the lines.

When we ask what it is all about? the answer is that it is an attempt to follow that “rushing metamorphosis” that we call love. Under one name we speak of the attraction of sex which man shares with all the animal world, and the highest and most disinterested affections. Here is a passion in its beginning sensuous and selfish, capable of infinite refinement till it becomes purely spiritual. Between love as a natural impulse and love as a religious experience there are innumerable subtle gradations. Emerson’s lines suggest the swiftness of the transitions.

At first love is unmoral.

“He is wilful, mutable,
Shy, untamed, inscrutable,
Swifter-fashioned than the fairies.
* * *
For Cupid goes behind all law.

“There are impulses that are
Restless, predatory, hasting;
And they pounce on other eyes
As lions on their prey.
And round their circles is writ
Plainer than the day,
Underneath, within, above,--
Love--love--love--love.”

Out of these primitive instincts arise the higher kinds of love. They do not develop in logical order. They are rather fierce and sudden passions which, however, tend toward nobleness.

“Man was made of social earth,
Child and brother from his birth,
Tethered by a liquid cord
Of blood through veins of kindred poured.”

There is developed a loyalty to family and tribe. There come “throbs of a wild religion.” There is

“Beauty of a richer vein
Graces of a subtler strain.”

After a time love is drawn to its object, not by a blind urgency, but a conscious choice. The lover is open-eyed.

“He doth elect
The beautiful and fortunate,
And the sons of intellect,
And the souls of ample fate,
Who the Future’s gate unbar.”

But this love with all its possibilities of chivalry and romance is at heart selfish. It seeks its own, and scorns all else.

“The Dæmons are self-seeking,
Their fierce and limitary will
Draws men to their likeness still.”

There is a love that “delights to build a road,” but “the Dæmon ever builds a wall.” That impulse which unites is met by an impulse which divides. So it happens that

“Ever the Dæmonic love
Is the ancestor of wars.”

But these partial preferences and passions do not exhaust the meaning of love. There is a celestial love.

“But God said,
‘I will have a purer gift,
There is smoke in the flame.’”

There is a love that is one with justice and truth. It is a passion still, but it is a passion for perfection. It comes with insight of a swifter kind.

“Thou must mount for love
Into vision where all form
In one only form dissolves.
* * *
“Pray for a beam
Out of that sphere,
Thee to guide and to redeem.
O, what a load of care and toil,
By lying use bestowed,
From his shoulders falls who sees
The true astronomy.”

The love of the one becomes the symbol of good-will to all.

“Not glad, as the low-loving herd,
Of self in other still preferred,
But they have heartily designed
The benefit of broad mankind.
And they serve men austerely,
After their own genius, clearly,
Without a false humility;
For this is Love’s nobility,--
Not to scatter bread and gold,
Goods and raiment bought and sold:
But to hold fast his simple sense,
And speak the speech of innocence,
And with hand, and body, and blood,
To make his bosom-counsel good.
For he that feeds men serveth few;
He serves all who dares be true.”

In all this Emerson is expressing his philosophy. But he does it not as a formal teacher, but as a poet.

In the “Threnody,” in which he sought comfort after the death of a dearly loved child, there is the same sense of the quick transitions between the physical and the spiritual. He summons his faltering thought to follow his boy into the vast regions of the unknown. It is not a void but full of possibilities of life.

“When frail Nature can no more,
Then the Spirit strikes the hour:
My servant Death, with solving rite,
Pours finite into infinite.”

The loved form disappears, but the love goes on in search of its object. Change there must be, but change does not mean destruction of real values. Emerson finds strength in the thought that what is “excellent is permanent.” And that permanence is not of form but of force.

“Wilt thou freeze love’s tidal flow,
Whose streams through nature circling go?
Nail the wild star to its track
On the half-climbed zodiac?
Light is light which radiates,
Blood is blood which circulates,
Life is life which generates,
And many-seeming life is one,--
Wilt thou transfix and make it none?
Its onward force too starkly pent
In figure, bone, and lineament?
Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate,
Talker! the unreplying Fate?
Nor see the genius of the whole
Ascendant in the private soul,
Beckon it when to go and come,
Self-announced its hour of doom?
Fair the soul’s recess and shrine,
Magic-built to last a season;
Masterpiece of love benign
Fairer that expansive reason
Whose omen ’tis, and sign.
Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
What rainbows teach, and sunsets show?
Verdict which accumulates
From lengthening scroll of human fates,
Voice of earth to earth returned,
Prayers of saints that inly burned,--
Saying, What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent;
Hearts are dust, hearts’ loves remain,
Heart’s love will meet thee again
Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye
Up to his style, and manners of the sky.
Not of adamant and gold
Built he heaven stark and cold;
No, but a nest of bending reeds,
Flowering grass, and scented weeds;
Or like a traveller’s fleeing tent,
Or bow above the tempest bent;
Built of tears and sacred flames,
And virtue reaching to its aims;
Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.
Silent rushes the swift Lord
Through ruined systems still restored,
Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless,
Plants with worlds the wilderness;
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.
House and tenant go to ground,
Lost in God, in Godhead found.”