Poems

AUTHOR: Emerson, Ralph Waldo

PUBLICATION: Centenary Edition: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 9. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903-1904.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/emerson/4957107.0009.001

In some of his poems Emerson expresses the concept of the One-All that informs the Transcendentalist theorizing found in, for example, A. Bronson Alcott's Tablets and Concord Days, as well as several of Charles Lane's writings.

KEYWORDS: land usage, environmentalism, nature, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Emerson's poems and essays address a similar concern with the immanence of God-Nature and the human's place within it. The seer, prophet, or childlike wise man is a recurrent figure that expresses this relation: the human embeddedness in the One-All. In “The Sphinx,” the titular figure expressly demands such a wise seer who is able to unlock the secrets of being: “'Who'll tell me my secret, / The ages have kept?— / I awaited the seer / While they slumbered and slept:— / "The fate of the man-child, / The meaning of man; / Known fruit of the unknown; / Daedalian plan; / Out of sleeping a waking, / Out of waking a sleep; / Life death overtaking; / Deep underneath deep?'” (20). The Sphinx also explicitly pronounces the interconnectedness of all and everything in nature: “'Sea, earth, air, sound, silence, / Plant, quadruped, bird, / By one music enchanted, / One deity stirred,— / Each the other adorning” (21). Similar to William Blake's famous grain of sand that corresponds to an entire world, Emerson's sphinx proclaims that “the sum of the world / In soft miniature lies” (21). Unfortunately, humans rarely manage to live according to this insight. Hence the sphinx's imperative that, "To vision profounder, / Man's spirit must dive'” (22).

In “Woodnotes I” and “Woodnotes II” such a visionary “forest seer” (44),  “poet” (43), and “philosopher” (45) – obviously modeled after Henry David Thoreau – roams the woods in intimate connection with nature: “Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed, / He roamed, content alike with man and beast” (46). This seer himself confides: “The purple berries in the wood / Supplied me necessary food; / For Nature ever faithful is / To such as trust her faithfulness” (48). Indeed, “all her shows did Nature yield, / To please and win this pilgrim wise” (45). Nature herself proclaims: “He is great who can live by me: / The rough and bearded forester / Is better than the lord” (49). This is so because the visionary forester yields to the powers of nature, attuned to the One as expressed in the Many: “All the forms are fugitive, But the substances survive” (57).

“The Rhodora: On Being Asked, Whence Is the Flower” emphasizes the One-All suffusing everything. The final line has the speaker express the insight that “The self-same Power that brought me there brought you” (38). In “The Adirondacs,” “through all creatures in their form and ways / Some mystic hint accosts the vigilant” (189). And in “Xenophanes” the speaker proclaims: “All things / Are of one pattern made; bird, beast, and flower / Song, picture, form, space, thought and character / Deceive us, seeming to be many things, / And are but one” (137). Hence, in “Bacchus,” the express demand is made for “Wine of wine, / Blood of the world, / Form of forms, and mould of statures, / That I intoxicated, / And by the draught assimilated, / May float at pleasure through all natures” (125).

Emerson's poetry repeatedly calls for a life lived in harmony with nature because all beings – animals, plants, humans, but also stones, mountains, stars – everything animate and inanimate, are ultimately one and the same. They are just different expressions of the same power. To recognize this and live accordingly is to live the good life. This is the foundation of Emerson's ethics.

 

Last updated on February 29th, 2024

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