[Donald Yannella is an American educator and a scholar of nineteenth-century American Literature. In this excerpt he shows that while "not all are great" Emerson's poems are "technically accomplished works" worthy of a distinguished rank in American poetry. Yannella begins by interpreting Emerson's poetic theory as stated in "The Poet," and proceeds to explicate a selection of Emerson's poems grouped together thematically.]

Emerson was forty-three years old when the first of his three volumes of poetry was issued on Christmas Day 1846. (It bears the publication date 1847.) Before any reader addresses himself to the verse, however, it is helpful to have some understanding of Emerson's theory of poetry and his views about the poet's purposes and functions. Properly understood, the poet and his art are central in the Transcendental fabric Emerson wove.

His interest in the subject began early—when he was a schoolboy, in fact—and grew with the years. He read widely and analytically, and was sensitive, discriminating, and articulate on the subject, as is evident from the great amount of space he devoted to aesthetic theory, poets, and poetry in his journals, letters, and lectures. In addition to these numerous references during the 1830s and early 1840s, as well as later, he offered one entire presentation, "The Poet," in the lecture series on "The Times" which he gave in 1841-42. But he made his most comprehensive and lasting utterance on the matter in the opening piece in Essays: Second Series (1844), also titled "The Poet." Here he presented the major portion of his mature thought on the role of the poet, as well as his theory of poetry.

In the essay Emerson states that the poet shares the Universe with two other children, the "Knower" and the "Doer," lovers of truth and goodness, respectively. The triumvirate is completed by the poet, the lover of beauty, the "Sayer," or "Namer." Emerson repeats the essential proposition of the Transcendental movement, that nature is symbolic, the universe emblematic; at the same time he reiterates the limitations of the Understanding, the path followed by the sensual man such as the scientist. And he concludes that although "The people fancy they hate poetry," they are, in fact, "all poets and mystics!"

This true poet, this arch-Transcendentalist, however, is discovered only infrequently. Not a mere "thinker," a "man of talent," he is "Man Thinking." His is the genius which will eradicate the ugly as he reintegrates those things which are dislocated and detached from God by perceiving their essential unity with nature and the Whole; the poet grasps the spiritual significance even of the factory-village, the railroad, and, of course, what is ordinarily comprehended as the natural world. By means of his superior insight the poet can induce a sort of transcendence, leading his reader to a vision similar to that described in the transparent eye-ball passage in Nature, among other places. Emerson confides that he himself experiences this kind of soaring when he reads a poem which he trusts as an inspiration: "And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live … and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations…. This day shall be better than my birthday: then I became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the real." In guiding us through nature, through experience, the poet "unlocks our chains and admits us to a new scene," leads us across the chasm to life and truth, and rescues us from the ironic fate of the "poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door." The ultimate, successful Transcendentalism "the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession." Poets are "liberating gods." Capable of that which all would rightly desire, they stand "among partial men for the complete man…. the man without impediment, who … traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart." Representing beauty, the poet "is a sovereign, and stands on the centre." He is not merely an arranger, a compiler or composer of meters but a "diviner," a "prophetic speaker," whether in verse or prose, in the vatic tradition. For his conception Emerson was actually reaching back to the ancient notion of the bard, echoing conventional Romantic notions of the poet.

Emerson's poetic theory is intimately related to this conception of the poet. Perhaps the clearest and most widely known public statement he made on the theory of poetry was in the eighth paragraph of the essay "The Poet" where he announced that "it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that … it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form." This precept that form is secondary probably helped inspire Whitman, for example, to be hospitable to the freedoms and new disciplines of vers libre. But the reader of Emerson's own poetry must be taken aback by his generally close adherence to his period's formal requirements, its conventions of verse. With few exceptions his poems scan easily and offer discernible rhyme schemes and regular line lengths.

His views on the technical requirements of verse are germane. In "Poetry and Imagination"—published in 1875, though portions were composed as early as the 1840s—for example, where he considers matters such as rhyme and meter, it is evident that he was in command of his materials and willing to insist on the conventions of English prosody because he understood their value, not because he accepted them blindly. He defends "the charm of rhyme to the ear" for the relief it offers from monotony and for the symmetry its very repetition provides. He also argues that the poet should allow poetry to "pass … into music and rhyme…. [which] is the transparent frame that allows almost the pure architecture of thought to become visible to the mental eye. Substance is much, but so are mode and form much." In a similar fashion he insists on the naturalness of meter by suggesting that "Metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs. If you hum or whistle the rhythm of the common English metres … you can easily believe these metres to be organic, derived from the human pulse, and to be therefore not proper to one nation, but to mankind." Since Emerson understood the conventions he observed in his own verse to be "organic," it seems unfair to criticize him for not realizing in his own poetry the innovations Whitman achieved.

My purpose in this [essay] is to discuss most of those poems which seem likely in my judgment to endure in the canon of American poetry. Certainly, not all are great. Many are of middling quality, some are uneven, and a few merely possess eminently quotable lines. What they do collectively, however, is demonstrate a more than respectable achievement in poetry by one of America's principal literary men.

To facilitate matters, particularly for those who are coming to Emerson's poetry for the first time, the poems are discussed within thematic groupings, the most important of which are the role of the poet, Man's relationship to nature, the public issues such as slavery which led to the Civil War, and personal subjects such as love and death. Although this arrangement seems preferable to a discussion of the development of Emerson's poetry in chronological order, my attempt to offer a coherent framework for sensible discussion should not—indeed, must not—preclude a reader's approaching any poem by a different avenue. My framework is a matter of convenience, not an attempt to fix Emerson's rich work in a set of categories.

"Merlin," one of the finest poems in the first collection, reveals Emerson's conception of the poet and his role, and also illustrates his reliance on the "renaissance tradition of paradoxy" [so called by Rosalie L. Colie in Paradoxical Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, 1966]. The speaker opens "Merlin I" with a tight assertion of what is and is not the "artful thunder" of bardic poetry: "Its chords should ring as blows the breeze, / Free, peremptory, clear" in order to "make the wild blood start / In its mystic springs." Having told us in no uncertain terms in the first eight lines that form and style, however pleasing, do not constitute the poem, he proceeds to describe the poet and his verse. Not merely a skilled and pleasing musician—a man of talent—this speaker's "kingly bard," Merlin, "Must smite the chords rudely and hard" in order to render organic poetry, the

Artful thunder, which conveys
Secrets of the solar track,
Sparks of the supersolar blaze.

This bard, unencumbered "With the coil of rhythm and number," shall in his transcendence '"mount to paradise / By the stairway of surprise / /.'" Anticipating the theme of opposites to be explored at the start of "Merlin II," Emerson further defines the centrality of paradox to the workings of the bard. Beguiled by Sybarites—the wild dancers of the rituals of classical mythology—Merlin with his "mighty line / Extremes of nature reconciled."

The second poem commences by amplifying this pairing, the balancing and compensating Emerson dwells upon in both series of Essays: "Balance-loving Nature / Made all things in pairs." It is little wonder that Emerson should dismiss the verse of those he judged to be merely talented, jingle-men such as Poe. What he sought, as he stated it succinctly in "Poetry and Imagination," was "The original force, the direct smell of the earth or the sea" as he found them in ancient poetry: the Sagas, English and Scottish balladry, bardic poetry, and, to the point, "Gawain's parley with Merlin" in Morte d'Arthur, which he quotes at length.

He concludes "Merlin II" with an oblique yet incisive description of the price, the "ruin rife," the poet must pay for the genuine bardic experience—the paradox of Merlin, "music-drunken," surrendering his liberty and control to the Fates in order to achieve a more organic relationship with the universe and, therefore, the insight to prophecy. When we consider this paradox, we should recognize the happy balance Emerson strikes in the form of "Merlin." He comes quite close to his own ideal of "metre-making argument" by achieving a successful mixture of the accepted conventions of nineteenth-century verse: the Common Meter of the initial four lines of "Merlin I" and the traditional rhyme schemes and regular line lengths of most of both poems are set off opposite the skillful "irregularly rhymed 'free verse'" of the second stanza of "Merlin I."

Another of his most successful efforts to explore the poet and his art is "Bacchus" (1847). The speaker here seeks the same "wildest freedom" and ecstatic abandon suggested in the "Merlin" poems. Indeed, striving to cast off the restraints of the Understanding, mere common-sense perceptions of experience, the poet courts transcendence, a merging of his Self with creation "Which on the first day drew … The dancing Pleiads and eternal men." The importance of this god to Emerson's thinking is perhaps suggested by his reference more than a quarter-century later when he discussed transcendence near the end of "Poetry and Imagination": "O celestial Bacchus! drive them mad, this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity." In the transcendent experience described in "Bacchus" and elsewhere there is a suggestion of what has been termed [by James E. Miller, Jr. in A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass as] the "inverted mysticism" of Whitman's poetry: the achievement of merger and vision not through asceticism but by means of bathing in sensual experience. This aspect of Emerson is beautifully articulated in the colloquial and pithy "Berrying" (1847), one of his better short poems, in which he uses Calvinist theology to assert the hedonism of the speaker. The irony of the speaker's discovering "dreams thus beautiful" and "wisdom" in the "Ethiops sweet" drives home with singular force his rejection of his Puritan forebears' conception of earth as "a howling wilderness" [as noted by Carl F. Strauch in "Emerson and the Doctrine of sympathy," Studies in Romanticism 6 (1967): 158].

But the exhilaration, or even ecstasy, enjoyed by the genuine poet requires that he suffer detachment from other men. "Saadi" (1842), Emerson's tribute to the Persian author he so admired, is one of his clearest poetic expressions of the loneliness and promise of the poet. Writing for the most part in octosyllabic couplets, Emerson commences the poem in rather breathless, short lines and immediately justifies the bard's aloofness by tracing it back to God's charge that the poet '"Sit aloof.'" Saadi, who "dwells alone," nevertheless loves Mankind. With the integrity of the scholar Emerson had described in his Phi Beta Kappa address, the poet ignores the din of life, reads his runes rightly, minds only his rhyme and listens solely to the whisper of the Muse: "Heed not what the brawlers say, / Heed thou only Saadi's lay." Detachment and commitment are, of course, prerequisites for the conventional Romantic sort of insight and inspiration, but they assure that the poet's words will reveal "Terror and beauty" as well as "Nature veritable." The upshot, the Muse promises, will be the opening of "innumerable doors" from which truth and goodness will flow, and so the poet will be admitted to the "perfect Mind." The promise and the poem conclude with a suggestion that the ultimates sought by the poet reside in the commonplace, the "crones," "gossips," "drones" who "rise in stature / To the height of mighty Nature" to reveal the secret "Fraudulent Time in vain concealed": "That blessed gods in servile masks / Plied for thee thy household tasks." If "Saadi" is not one of Emerson's more memorable poetic statements, it is one of his more forthright expressions on the subject, purpose, and means available to the poet….

It is clear that the Transcendental experience in its widest definition is the subject of most of Emerson's poetry. Some of his best recounts the substance of the poet's nonrational encounter with the "Not-Me," as he phrased the world beyond Self in Nature, and others explore the dangers and pain of the role itself. Many more, also successful and enduring, focus on nature, including Man's connections to it. Some celebrate Man's right relation to nature while others criticize the materialism of modern culture which distorts life by precluding our having healthy links to the natural world. Two of the more enduring among the earlier nature poems are "Each and All" (1839) and "The Snow-Storm" (1841).

Judged [by Carl F. Strauch in "The Year of Emerson's Poetic Maturity: 1834," Philological Quarterly, No. 34, 1955] to be Emerson's "first unquestionably great poem," "The Snow-Storm" was written during the winter of 1834-35. The first of its two stanzas of blank verse offers a general description of the arriving snow as it "veils the farm-house at the garden's end"; notes a foundered sled and the traveler it carries; and, finally, locates the speaker and the reader in the cozy warmth of a classic country homestead inhabited by people seated about "the radiant fireplace, enclosed / In a tumultuous privacy of storm." What Emerson presents here is the conventional setting for the traditional event celebrated in so much New England poetry, the snow-storm. The nineteen lines which comprise the second stanza are among the most vivid and artistically wrought performances in poetic imagery in Emerson's canon. The artist of the passage, the north wind, "Curves his white bastions with projected roof / Round every windward stake, or tree, or door." Then "Mockingly, / On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths; / A swanlike form invests the hidden thorn." The familiar world is enhanced and mystified not randomly or by chance but consciously by art; with dazzling simplicity Emerson conjures up the classic and gleaming white statuary of ancient Greece by referring to the famed marbles of the island of Paros, which is similar to the snowed-in farm not only in its statues but in its pristine artifacts. The stormy, wild, creative period finished, the northwind

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

As the poem challenges materialism it celebrates the nourishment provided Man by sympathetic communion with nature.

"Each and All," another of the poems composed in 1834—the year which probably was a turning-point in Emerson's poetic development—is another of the finest products of his early career. Composed of only fifty-one lines, it signals a major advance in his perception of Man's relation to nature; by using Reason rather than Understanding the poet perceives unity amid the diversity of the world. Emerson has moved beyond the awe which the natural world inspired among contemporaries who merely observed and classified, and has come to sense a profound if unspoken resonance in nature.

The poem is traditional and conventional in its meters, its logical tripartite structure, and its virtually unrelieved rhymed, occasionally closed, couplets; only three lines are without mates and only the eight lines which commence the final section slip into an ababcded pattern. Emerson wisely balances the formality of the technique, however, with the commonplace and simple—but nevertheless evocative—inhabitants of nature. Following his observation that "All are needed by each one; / Nothing is fair or good alone"—a principle which emerges from his observation that nature's creatures, including Man, indeed affect each other—he proceeds to test the proposition by nothing the discordance, even the ugliness, of the sparrow, the seashell, and the bride when they are wrenched from their natural settings. This is one facet of the truth he covets in line 37, the beginning of the third and final part of the poem; penetrating the wood more deeply—encountering on a sensual level the ground-pine, club-moss burrs, violets, oaks, and acorns, as well as the sky, the river, and the morning bird—he reports that "Beauty through my senses stole; / I yielded myself to the perfect whole." In this celebratory and rising couplet we hear a suggestion of the same sort of Transcendental sympathy, even merging, he was to detail so often. If the psychological and spiritual significances and nuances are not uttered here, as they so frequently are in his later writings, it is probably because the experience is novel. But, of course, Emerson was never able or even desirous to reduce the Transcendental experience to the terms of the Understanding; such an attempt, even if conceivable, would necessarily have been frustrated. This reluctance is central in his poetry and should be borne in mind. Emerson frequently prefers to suggest rather than state….

One issue which every serious reader must at some time confront is the degree to which Emerson's pastoralism turned him against the developments of urban industrialism in nineteenth-century America. Of course, his dilemma has been shared by intellectuals and artists, including serious writers, since the advent of the industrial revolution. Emerson, as we have seen, has generally been viewed as a figure in the agrarian tradition. His Romantic bias, with its implicit rejection of materialism, has been interpreted as an attempt by him and his fellow Transcendentalists to recapture a sense of awe in the face of nature, a sense of wonder which materialistic urban industrialism had stolen from them. The question can also be explored from a different stance that questions this judgment that Emerson was categorically hostile to the city, an archsymbol of life in the nineteenth century. The suggestion is that Emerson's observation of the dichotomy between the city and nature was not a conclusion but a point of departure for his hope that the city would become more organically related to nature. His hero was neither bumpkin nor slicker, but the reconciler of the pastoral and urban, the cosmopolitan who by carrying the lesson of nature to the cities would alter the patterns of life they were developing. In short, Emerson was no Huck Finn turning his back on the facts of modern life and lighting out for the territory. He was a realist who confronted the facts of nineteenth-century life but whose vision sprang from the high expectations of an optimistic Romantic. He was as open to the possibilities of the proper development of the city as he was to the potentials of machine power and even the factory system. In neither case, though, would Emerson tolerate the materialism which resulted in the absurdity of the machine riding humanity, or the city defining life. Which brings us to a few other pieces in which Emerson celebrates Man's right relations with nature….

"Woodnotes" (1840-41) has been judged [by Joseph Warren Beach in The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, 1936] to be Emerson's "great comprehensive nature-poem." It is a work of some 460 lines in two parts and relies almost exclusively on octosyllabic couplets. Perfectly traditional in its prosody, it is essentially—at least in the form which Emerson arrived at by the 1876 edition—a celebration of Man's proper relation to Nature. His affirmations are enhanced by the contrasts supplied by several passages in which Man's being out of tune with the cosmos is described. For example, the fifth stanza of "Woodnotes II" commences with an invitation in the voice of the poet to learn with him "the fatal song / Which knits the world in music strong." He sustains the appropriate music metaphor—which he repeatedly sounds when handling Man's relations with the rest of creation—to the point that "Nature beats in perfect tune." This is the reality. But at the same time Man is admonished—"The wood is wiser far than thou." Man, the "poor child! unbound, unrhymed," has somehow in the evolutionary process been "divorced, deceived and left"; he remains undernourished, sickly,

An exile from the wilderness,—
The hills where health with health agrees,
And the wise soul expels disease.

In a word—the one Emerson employs in the first line of the sixth stanza—Man suffers from "bankruptcy" moral, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual. The condition is clearly due to ills such as the "city's poisoning spleen" which had been cited near the beginning of stanza 2 of this second section.

But "Woodnotes," both parts, is largely a celebration of Man's right relation to nature, an exploration of the processes—the surrenders—necessary for him to establish communion and a description of the rewards he will enjoy if he does. Slow-paced and, frankly, prolix and belabored at times, the poem is a Transcendentalist's celebration. Like the titmouse, the pine tree which serves as the subject of the first line of "Woodnotes I" and predominates in "Woodnotes II" serves as a unifying symbol and is key in the illumination which takes place. In short, the lesson offered by the small, commonplace pine—by its very existence and through its hints and bold statements—is crucial to the enlightenment of the consciousness which engages it. In "Woodnotes" as in other poems the poet is not a shaper of nature but rather a seer looking into her.

There is no equivocation in Emerson's establishing the poet at home in the forest. His engagement is simple, physical, and, indeed, Romantic; a "Lover of all things alive," he is a "Wonderer at all he meets, / Wonderer chiefly at himself." At this point the communing poet is cast in the image of Rousseau's awe-struck child during his first encounter with the natural world. Section 2 of "Woodnotes I" further describes the vital connections enjoyed by this "forest seer." Sensitive to and knowledgeable about virtually all facets of nature, he is privy to its secrets as well as its revelations, its common and too frequently overlooked phenomena and occurences. Further, the enchanted, even magical, dimensions of this primal engagement are suggested. It is, "As if by secret sight he knew / Where, in far fields, the orchis grew." The phallic suggestion implicit in "orchis" reinforces the vital, vigorous, nonrational dimensions of the experience. This man is no mere naturalist seeking to classify, no slave to the Understanding. He is the "pilgrim wise," the "philosopher" who receives the secrets of the partridge, woodcock, thrush, and hawk—creatures who are only dimly perceived at a distance by ordinary people.

Prosodically, section 3 of the first part stands unique in the poem. Setting aside the octosyllabic couplets he relies on for virtually the entire poem, Emerson moves into chanting pentameters. In tracing the steps of the forest seer he presents the range and poignancy of his experience in the direct fashion of the catalogue: the Maine wilderness, the forest inhabited by the moose, bear, woodpecker, pine. The seer witnesses the lumberman's felling the noble tree, but unlike the exploiters of the wood (plunderers such as the rapacious tribe of Aaron Thousandacres in Cooper's Chainbearer and the lumber interests which laid bare the land Faulkner's Isaac McCaslin had known) Emerson's "wise man is at home, / His hearth the earth." In nature he is as much in tune and as reverent as Thoreau, Natty Bumppo, and most of Romanticism's heroes, especially the Americans. His "clear spirit" is "By God's own light illumined and foreshadowed."

Section 4, in which Emerson returns to his ballad measure, climaxes the celebration of Man's harmony in nature. The simple, "musing peasant" who is at the "heart of all the scene" testifies to his utter surrender to the forest and to the spirit which inhabits it. Even in death Mother Nature will embrace, enfold this child as he returns to her arms.

Crucial to the entire poem is the quatrain which introduces "Woodnotes II":

As sunbeams stream through liberal space
And nothing jostle or displace,
So waved the pine-tree through my thought
And fanned the dreams it never brought.
(Emerson's italics)

The illumination of the receptive consciousness by this humble and commonplace representative of nature, the pine tree, is strikingly captured by means of the sunbeam reference. The pine beckons and enlightens the man, nourishes and sustains him as the sun's rays warm the world. This earth-rooted creature announces the democracy so central to Emerson's thought: "The rough and bearded forester / Is better than the lord." Further, in the evolution of humanity and spirit—creation in general—"The lord is the peasant that was, / The peasant the lord that shall be." But vitality, youth, vigor are, at least for the time being, the peasant's. In the second stanza the tree announces the services it offers to him who will exist in harmony with it. More important, of course, is the moral and spiritual sustenance it promises the person who eschews the distorting and corrupting influences of the civilized world which his race has created, and embraces the pristine and virtuous natural world: "Into that forester shall pass … power and grace." The Mother will protect the "formidable innocence" of her child.

The ecstasy of the wood-god's song intensifies in the third stanza as it offers the "mystic song / Chanted when the sphere was young." Time and space are suspended as the "paean," the song of thanksgiving, rises, "swells." And we are brought back to the "genesis," "The rushing metamorphosis" when fixed nature dissolves and "Melts things that be to things that seem, / And solid nature to a dream." The "chorus of the ancient Causes," however, may not be heard by ordinary mortals whose ears are of stone. Only the pure—die surrendering, transcending seers—may hear it.

The song nears its crescendo as we are invited to compose with the pine a "nobler rhyme." Despite the nationalistic note Emerson injects near the beginning of stanza 4—"Only thy Americans / Can read thy line, can meet thy glance"—the condition the pine has celebrated knows no national boundaries.

In stanza 5, after describing in scorning terms the plight, the tragedy of most people, who are out of tune with the cosmos, Emerson chants the virtues and advantages of the person who will fall into harmony with it and "outsee seers, and outwit sages." The external truth is that "A divine improvisation, / From the heart of God proceeds." Forever evolving, the "eternal Pan" reincarnates itself in "new forms." In describing the Deity in this last and longest stanza of the poem, Emerson reaches for a variety of metaphors: He is the pourer of the precious, nourishing beverage; He is the life-bearing bee, the wide-ranging sheep. Finally, at the end of the pine's increasingly mystical chant, Emerson slips into the abstractions, metaphors, and paradoxes traditional to the explanations of mystics, theologians, and poets:

Thou metest him by centuries,
And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou askest in fountains and in fires,
He is the essence that inquires.
He is the axis of the star;
He is the sparkle of the spar;
He is the heart of every creature;
He is the meaning of each feature;
And his mind is the sky.
Than all it holds more deep, more high.

The nonrational dimension which Emerson has delved into here is impossible to reduce to rational terms. The Transcendental experience he attempts to verbalize plummets to earth the moment it is penetrated and collapsed to ordinary, comprehensible terms. Riddling is evident from the questions posed throughout the poem. How often does wisdom reside in the poignant and penetrating, if unanswerable, question? How frequently is the wise answer in fact a puzzle? Which brings us to the riddle of "The Sphinx."

Emerson's regard for "The Sphinx" (1841) was probably best expressed by his using it as the lead poem in his first collection. Certainly one of his most enduring poems, and probably one of his greatest, "The Sphinx" should be viewed as an expression of the poet's conception of himself as riddler—a revealer of whatever truth he perceives and reports by means of paradox—and as an exploration of the "disjunction between man and nature."

First published in 1841, the poem is more mystical and baffling than most of Emerson's more difficult verse. The sense of eternity and timelessness which emerges near the end of "WoodnotesII" is apparent from the first stanza of "The Sphinx." From time immemorial, while the ages have "slumbered and slept," the drowsy Sphinx has awaited the seer who will reveal her secret to her. The eternal questions are posed: "'The fate of the man-child, / The meaning of man.'" Man is the culminating and most apparent creature, the fruit or upshot of the "unknown"—the force, spirit, motive—at the center of the cosmos. And the scheme or plan which has produced him is Daedalian, one of cunning artifice. The life cycle is called forth in the second quatrain of the stanza: "Out of sleeping a waking"—nonentity and being are not appropriate substitutes for these metaphors, from the Transcendental point of view—and then back to sleep; death, at least physical death, overtakes life, which is itself another layer of mystery, or "deep," beneath the first.

Beginning with stanza 3, Emerson rehearses the harmony of creation. The palm, elephant, thrush, waves, breezes, atoms exist in mutual and perfect unity, inspirited by the universal being "By one music enchanted, / One deity stirred." The human dimension emerges in stanza 6. The babe appears; the Rousseauistic child of conventional Romanticism, even of Platonism, is "bathèd in joy" and "Without cloud, in its eyes." Naturally, it functions and flourishes on a harmonious, integrated, and nonrational level, basking in an essential and all-too-often ignored sustainer of life itself, such as the sun.

But in the next stanza Man out of tune with the cosmos appears; he "crouches and blushes, / Absconds and conceals"—"An oaf, an accomplice, / He poisons the ground." In stanza 8 the sphinx asks who is responsible for Man's fallen state, the "sadness and madness" from which her boy suffers. The analysis—if it might be called such—of the poet commences in stanza 9. First he blames the "Lethe of Nature": While Man's soul might see or sense perfection and long for a harmonious sharing with the universal spirit which inhabits the rest of creation, animate and inanimate, he nevertheless cannot effect his natural desire: "his eyes seek in vain." Perhaps, the poet suggests, the perfection he instinctively seeks is out of reach; life is in fact a series of plateaus, spires, ever-evolving circles, the attainment of one inevitably leading him to desire the next "vision profounder" which once found he will spurn in his desire for "new heavens." In his attempt to explain, or at least understand, this poet admits that he himself suffers from the condition and wishes, for example, that his lover were more noble than to settle on him as the object of affection, attraction, aspiration. The flux, the flow, the unceasing evolution of the cosmos are expressed succinctly with "Eterne alternation." The reassurance of Transcendental faith, however, is offered: "Love works at the centre, / Heart-heaving alway."

The ultimate meaning of the poem does not lie in the all-too-facile explanations of this poet. Rather, it resides in the concluding four stanzas in which the poet—who is not to be identified with Emerson—concludes his answer to the sphinx; she in turn responds; and the narrator-poet—who is close to Emerson if not him—forms what conclusion he can from what he reports as having transpired.

There is clearly an underlying superciliousness and an almost comic self-confidence in the reductive simplicity in the answer of the poet—who is not to be confused with the narrator-poet. It is captured tersely in his conclusion, where he addresses her as "Dull Sphinx" and observes that her "sight is growing blear"—recall the babe's clarity of vision, noted above. He even presumes to prescribe the remedy "Her muddy eyes to clear!" The sphinx, the eternal symbol of silent wisdom, rebukes the insolent, even arrogant fellow who would reduce mystery to logical explanation. The point is that what she reveals is not at all clear. Her statement does not unequivocally answer or attempt to correct the poet's explanation. What insight revealed by Reason can ever be so expressed? Rather the sphinx turns the question on him: You yourself, poet, are the "unanswered question" and if you are capable of seeing that, keep asking it, even though you will know beforehand that each successive answer will in fact be a lie. The signs of wisdom are awe in the face of the mystery, appropriate humility and respect.

If the merry poet is not capable of recognizing the justice of the sphinx's good-humored assault on his explanation, the narrator—presumably Emerson—is more than able. For him the sphinx soars into symbol; she and her message inspirit, illuminate, and in fact merge with the representatives of physical actuality—some startling, some commonplace, but all finally wondrous by virtue of her: stone, cloud, moon, flame, blossom, wave, and mountain. She herself becomes the poet and offers hope to Mankind: '"Who telleth one of my meanings / Is master of all I am'" and the telling simply cannot be on the commonsense level of the Understanding. Rationalism, the curse of modern Man, is the cause of his being out of harmony with the cosmos. Reason, the nonrational, is the way to wisdom. This is the secret shared by the sphinx and the genuine poet—the poet as distinct from the verse-maker. As Dichter, vates, the inspired and wise speaker of riddles, the poet offers truth—reality—and also secures to the degree possible a right relation to the baffling mysteries of the universe and existence.

The variety of Emerson's response to the natural world would not be appreciated were the reader to ignore the joyful lightness of the colloquial, homespun narrative of "The Adirondacs" (1867), a work which reflects his later mellowness and stands in contrast to his Transcendental madness. On its most elementary level the poem records the pleasure experienced by Emerson and his fellows in the Adirondack Club during the 1850s. In recounting the holiday of 1858, he celebrates in a fashion almost cliche the beauty and serenity of the wilderness and the group's shared sense of relief from everyday, insubstantial cares. This is the voice of homespun, laced with a keen sense of the comic:

Hard fare, hard bed and comic misery,—
The midge, the blue-fly and the mosquito
Painted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands.

Reading even on this level, however, one has to wince at the incongruity, even fatuousness of the joy with which the Transcendentalist reports the vacationers' response to the news that the transatlantic cable has finally been laid. The importance of whether the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough, the poignant and pointed question raised by Thoreau earlier in the decade, seems of no concern to our speaker in stanzas 17 and 18. Rather, there is a certain resignation—one has to strain too hard to capture an ironic tone—as he accepts his own and his fellows' limited horizons, their apparent inability or lack of desire to engage nature with other than the Understanding. The crowd included the naturalist Louis Agassiz and the comparative anatomist Jeffries Wyman. Stanza 19 commences:

We flee away from cities, but we bring
The best of cities with us, these learned classifiers,
Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.

The holidays end and civilization intrudes as it simply could not upon the genuine Transcendental experiences he had recorded a decade or two earlier:

And Nature, the inscrutable and mute,
Permitted on her infinite repose
Almost a smile to steal to cheer her sons,
As if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed.

It is not unfair to suggest that the sense of mystery held forth by the Sphinx of the earlier poem is at best tolerantly alluded to here; it seems no longer to be really desired. As in poems such as "Monadnoc" (1847), "Musketaquid" (1847), "Waldeinsamkeit" (1858), and "May-Day" (1867), the sense of mystery and awe is absent, the bardic chants have been abandoned. In this poem a mellower, warmer Emerson, now fifty-five, offers us a Romantic tenderfoot's sensual experience; absent is the burning need for Reason to command and transcendence to occur. The lesson of the guides, the wilderness men of stanzas 7 and 8, is less a model of engagement with nature and of pristine virtue than a homespun alternative to the perfectly acceptable ways of life of the "polished gentlemen," the "Ten scholars" in whose company Emerson enjoys his recreation. In short, the civilized and the wilderness seem to have been reconciled in the glow of late middle age.

Not all of Emerson's poetry concerns Man's relations with nature or the art of the poet. Among what promise to be the more enduring works, there are several which contemplate and speak to the issues which gave rise to the Civil War, and several others which articulate deeply felt personal experiences, notably the death of his son Waldo. In addition there is a small gathering of poems for public occasions, the best of which is the "Concord Hymn."

The work Emerson placed last in his first collection, "Concord Hymn" was first sung at the celebration marking the completion of the Revolutionary War battle monument on which it is carved. A public, patriotic utterance, first delivered on July 4, 1837, the poem stands—and rightly so—as one of the most memorable of its genre. Composed of four quatrains in octosyllabics, it begins with an inspiring tribute to the "embattled farmers" who "fired the shot heard round the world"—one of Emerson's better remembered lines. The second stanza notes the passage of time and the attending change which has been wrought; the third focuses on the events of the commemoration; and the final quatrain sings the message which is the principal purpose of the poem: "Bid Time and Nature gently spare / The shaft we raise." The most remarkable quality of this dignified public poem is its restraint, its controlled emotion and skillful avoidance of mawkish patriotism.

Slavery is one of the thematic groupings in which we find some excellent poems as well as some of moderate success. The "Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing" (1847) has as its primary concern the materialism which informed the political arena inhabited by Daniel Webster. The poem employs tight, emotionally charged dimeters and trimeters and what is best described as erratic rhyming, both of which communicate the intensity of Emerson's feelings on the subject. The first two stanzas in effect apologize for or justify the distance Emerson chose to keep from the political fray. Neither the "priest's cant" nor the "statesman's rant" will force him to abandon his "honied thought." Indeed, if he leaves his study "The angry Muse / Puts confusion in [his] brain." Emerson will simply not raise the specter of compromise, which would open the possibility of his wavering from a position of principle.

Following this self-justification, the voice launches into an angry, actually sneering, attack on Webster. It commences with a rhetorical question regarding the master politician's empty and foolish lip service to "the culture of mankind, / Of better arts and life?" This is unconscionable prating at a time the expansionist government in its hunger for territory is "Harrying Mexico." More malign than the shortsighted and foolish men of "Guy" and "Hamatreya," these materialists are cut from the same cloth as the "jackals" who hold slaves, "little men" before whom "Virtue palters; Right is hence; / Freedom praised, but hid." Reptilian imagery, carrying reference to the betrayal in the Eden myth, winds throughout the poem: "blindworm," "snake," even "stolen fruit." But the climax of Emerson's moral censure and contempt comes in stanzas 6 and 7, which conclude with two of his most memorable lines: "Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind." The upshot of this gross and callous materialism is that man is unkinged, the "law for thing[s] … runs wild." Expansion, commerce, development, and exploitation have become ends in and of themselves. The tone of the last two stanzas is more restrained, prophetic. Emerson is not calling upon the "wrinkled shopman" to commune with nature, nor is he asking the powerful senator to "Ask votes of thrushes in the solitudes." Rather, with the calm assurance of the reflecting and principled Transcendentalist, he is predicting that Freedom will carry the war if not the battle. Flux, change, balance, compensation will right the wrongs. Ultimately, the affairs of the nation will be in the hands of leaders and followers who will be better than the "little men" with whom "The God who made New Hampshire [has] / Taunted the lofty land…."

A few poems which should continue to stand the test of time are autobiographical and reveal the deep stress to which Emerson was subjected during his great creative period in the 1830s and 1840s.

"Threnody" (1847), one of his most personal utterances, is an elegy which bares the emotional pain he suffered when his five-year-old son, Waldo, died early in 1842; it is also a remarkable illustration of the fervor and depth of the poet's Transcendentalism. A fine example of the binary form he favored, the first part sounds the poet's lament and the second expresses what reconciliation, if not consolation, the "deep Heart" offers to assuage the singer's wound. Neither the poem nor the philosophical acceptance of the child's death which it chants was hastily or easily won, as is evident from the slow and difficult development of its sentiments in the journals and letters of the period.

The poem, which is for the most part composed in Emerson's favorite octosyllabic couplets, begins by announcing without irony that, in effect, April is indeed the cruellest month. There is literally no distinction between Emerson and a persona as he reports that the South-wind cannot alter the passing of Waldo, "The darling who shall not return." The poet's anguish is expressed in the commonplace realities—the "empty house"—and vital recollections—Waldo's "silver warble wild"—with which he is left. Most effective in the second stage, and pertinent to the entire poem, is the language of the pulsing, dazzling life which he uses to describe the "wondrous child," the "hyacinthine boy." Stanza 3 asks, among other questions, where the boy is and recalls the enchanting effect he had on the lives he touched, and the next two stanzas are even more specific as Emerson recollects the lad's activities and confronts the emblems of him which remain: the "painted sled," "gathered sticks," "The ominous hole he dug in the sand." And then he offers what becomes an intense and bewildered account of the uninterrupted natural process, which leads him into the transitional passage in which he questions whether there might have been a "watcher," an "angel," in the universe which "Could stoop to heal that only child, / Nature's sweet marvel undefiled." There follows a long section of introspection and a search for philosophical and psychological distinction in which the mourner wonders if, indeed, "Perchance not he but Nature ailed, / The world and not the infant failed." Perhaps the world "was not ripe yet to sustain / A genius of so fine a strain." The eighth stanza, which concludes the first part of the poem, reveals a despairing, confused, and bitter speaker, a man "too much bereft" who can only chant:

O truth's and nature's costly lie!
O trusted broken prophecy!
O richest fortune sourly crossed!

The next two stanzas present the answer of the "deep Heart" which begins with a stern though not scolding response to the anguish of the grieving parent. There is no reason to question Emerson's sincerity in describing the wisdom which sustains him during this period of terrible loss, although readers who seem more emotional than philosophical might wonder at the toughness of the reconciliation. It was a reconciliation, however, won after great difficulty and should even be viewed as an ultimate test of the bereaved father's Transcendental faith. (He addressed the problem in the essay "Experience," which explains some of the thinking necessary to understand the poem.) Beneath his stoicism lies the foundation of compensation and the many other supports of the philosophical system—if it may be labeled such—Emerson had constructed. The wisdom born of speculation and experience was not only hard won but genuine. In a moment of severest test, the death of a loved one—one of the several losses he had endured—the underpinnings he had placed served him well. He did not collapse.

The statement of the "Heart" in "Threnody" is conventionally Emersonian. It asks, "But thou, my votary, weepest thou? / I gave thee sight—where is it now?" There is a reason, although it is beyond Man's ability to grasp it. The tone of the Heart softens, however, in the final stanza as it calls the mourner's attention to the larger process, the inevitable flux, of nature and then asks two poignant, rhetorical questions, positive answers to which would be absurd:

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?

Change is at the center of the evolving universe, change from which nothing can escape. Emerson relies on a group of organic metaphors to define this evolution born of flux: "bending reeds, / Flowering grass and scented weeds." If this cannot be reduced to rational terms, to the context of Understanding, so much the better. It is in fact a matter of Reason, of faith; the poet is admonished to "Revere the Maker," who rushes silently "Through ruined systems still restored." Appropriately enough, the paradox of the last line—"Lost in God, in Godhead found"—is introduced by the images of death and larger vision which are joined in the two preceding lines of the poem: "Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow. / House and tenant go to ground"

The stoicism and organicism of "Threnody" offer one avenue to the appreciation of "Give All to Love" (1847). One senses the same depth of feeling here as in the lament for the dead Waldo. After describing in rather abstract terms the intensity of the emotion and the Tightness of surrender, Emerson cautions, "Yet, hear me, yet." Anticipate, prepare for her fleeing by accepting it and recognizing that despite the immediate and apparent pain which the beloved's departure causes, her leaving is natural, even inevitable. Rightly understood, it is even an occasion for rejoicing for new insight: "When half-gods go"—that is, earthly love departs—"The gods arrive" with then wisdom born of Reason. Stoic perhaps even to the point of coldness, the sentiment is from the same Transcendental fabric as that of "Threnody."

There is no more fitting work than "Terminus" with which to end this discussion of Emerson's poetry. Although it was collected in May-Day and Other Pieces in 1867, it probably was composed in the 1850s, shortly after the burst of poetic activity which preceded the publication of the first collection of poems. "Terminus" is a weary and gentle poem, movingly honest and, it seems, overly modest in its assessment of Emerson's own gifts and accomplishments. The fires which had ignited his imagination are at least banked. The poem commences with a lamentation that "It is time to be old, / To take in sail," and he announces that what power has inspired him, "The god of bounds," has ordered him

The organic metaphor is appropriate; the sense of limit and failing potential is scarcely redeemed by the suggestion that the poet will "Mature the unfallen fruit," perhaps such poems as "The Adirondacs" and "The Titmouse." More touching and disturbing is the sense of failure which concludes the first stanza. Of course, Emerson is referring to his lineage here, but more important he is describing his own ambivalence, his suspension, which caused his lack of success "Amid the gladiators" of the world of action as well as "Amid the Muses" who left him "deaf and dumb." This is not merely false modesty, a clever if transparent bid for contradiction by the reader, but it might betray a disturbing lack of comprehension of his achievement, or it might even suggest that the piece was composed during a period of deep depression. The bleakness of the poem is scarcely redeemed by the resignation one hears in the last stanza—"I trim myself to the storm of time"—or by the stoic fortitude recommended by the words of the god which conclude the poem:

Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.

The number of Emerson's poems which have endured, and those which might continue to, may be modest. But then, aside from the giants of English poetry who reign as strongly today as they have in the past centuries—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton certainly—is Emerson's achievement significantly less than that of others in the second and third tiers of the English poetic tradition? Probably not. Although one early critic [W.T. Harris] undoubtedly overstated the case when he suggested that Emerson's poetry would probably outlast his prose, among American poets Emerson does deserve, by virtue of those remarkably intense and technically accomplished works discussed in this chapter, to hold a place equal to that of our dozen most important poets. At least, to cite a cliché among students of American Romanticism, if Emerson is "not our greatest writer," he is "our only inescapable one…. Denied or scorned, he turns up again in every opponent, however orthodox, classical, conservative or even just Southern" [Harold Bloom in The Ringers in the Tower, 1971]. True as this less than faint praise may be—and it is perhaps a strategy of defense which the reader should hear with irony—the fact remains that Emerson at his best gave us some of our finest poems.