Emerson delayed until 1847 the first edition of his poems, "uncertain always," he wrote to his brother, whether he had "one true spark of that fire which burns in verse." It is not probable that to-day any critic of importance could be found to share his doubt. Whatever may be said of his prose there is one thing that must be said by all men of his poetry, that it is the expression of a poet. We may search for lines that do not scan, for endings that do not rhyme, for a metre that does not flow or march or sing, for dialect and colloquialism, intricacy of diction, and grammatical inversion. We may find any or all of these and we shall not have disturbed by a hair's breadth our inner knowledge that we have been pecking and quibbling over the loveliest product of our national life. "It is his greatest glory as a poet," Dr. Garnett wrote in his account of Emerson, "to have been the harbinger of distinctively American poetry to America." Possibly: but it is not our least glory as a nation that thus early in our literature one poet could make our wilderness blossom like the rose, and we may hope that somewhere the blessed seed lies waiting for his successor, not yet within the field of vision.

We may well enough doubt, however, if Emerson's poetry is ever to be popular poetry. The American people would have fulfilled a high ideal of democracy indeed were that to come about. Every poem is charged with thought and thinking is not popular. But every poem also is an example of Emerson's own theory that poetry is "the perpetual endeavour to express the spirit of the thing," and it is the presence of the spirit, penetrating and informing the thought, that makes Emerson's poetry permanently buoyant. The intellectual element strong as it is in it is borne upward in the flight of powerful sentiment. At one time his essays, so pellucid in their crystallised illustrations, were considered recondite and abstruse, and at the same time his poetry was said to be filled with unintelligible expressions. The day of "popular science" has since arrived, and the popularisation of subjects formerly reserved for the learned is now so extended that one may go far to encounter readers in difficulty over Emerson's erudite allusions. One of his early public was heard not long ago to complain that the "Threnody," beautiful though it was, contained passages of mysticism too complicated for his understanding. But one rereading discovered the fact that while the noble and tender emotion retained its power to fill the eyes with tears, the darkness had become light and not a line of obscurity interrupted the mood of exalted resignation induced by the poet's acquiescence in the harmony of natural laws.

It is then easily conceivable that to the larger number of educated men and women who read poetry, that of Emerson will be continually satisfying. It is inspired by the conviction that in no other way can truth be spoken, a conviction always potent to move sincere minds. And it is raised infinitely above prose by its delicate sensitiveness to suggestion in place of dogma. "God himself does not speak prose, but communicates with us by hints, omens, inference, and dark resemblances in objects lying all around us." Moreover it is essentially the voice of the age and country to which it belongs in its brevity and concentration. "Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and in proportion to the inspiration checks loquacity." There indeed spoke the American, the man of all men to whom ennui is terrible, and diffuse sentiment ridiculous. If the soul is to be revealed there must be no long preamble to the overwhelming vision, and if we are not stirred beyond the possibility of expansive comment we have not seen. This terseness of description has, of course, its defect. It seldom conveys the sense of sweet leisure and the quiet influence of natural objects. In this stanza from "Saadi" its least fortunate aspect is shown, the abruptness of the images having no special fitness to the subject:

Trees in groves,
Kine in droves,
In ocean sport the scaly herds,
Wedge-like cleave the air the birds,
To northern lakes fly wind-borne ducks,
Browse the mountain sheep in flocks,
Men consort in camp and town,
But the poet dwells alone.

There is, too, a certain harshness of measure in many of his poems to which our generation responds more readily than the previous one, no doubt, but which is too suggestive of conscious revolution against the insipid melody of much of the poetry of his own day.

The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace,

he announces in "Merlin," and his intention to make "each word a poem," to fill each word with significance, has sometimes given his vocabulary an excess of substance which it takes all the free strong movement of his thought to carry. And it is true that he seldom used any but the simplest pattern in his constructions. Octosyllabic and decasyllabic lines satisfied his idea of "fit quantity of syllables" for the most part, and metrical intricacy had no charm for him. But to consider him therefore monotonous or unskilled in producing the effects of art is to judge him superficially. Many are his devices, when the ear is at the point of missing the prick of novelty, to seize its attention and renew its interest. Note, for example, how delightfully the slightly irregular jog-trot of the first stanza of the "Ode to Beauty" breaks in the second stanza into a pacing measure conveying the very essence of blithe emotion that maketh the heart glad without reason:

I drank at thy fountain
False waters of thirst;
Thou intimate stranger,
Thou latest and first!
Thy dangerous glances
Make women of men
New-born, we are melting
Into nature again.

Lavish, lavish promiser,
Nigh persuading gods to err!
Guest of million painted forms
Which in turn thy glory warms!
The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,
The acorn's cup, the rainbow's arc,
The swinging spider's silver line
The ruby of the drop of wine.

But it would be a difficult matter to analyse Emerson's prosody. He has at least the happy skill to dispose the stress in his lines where it will emphasise the meaning and he does this without regard to arbitrary rules. The result is sometimes rocky syllables that forbid the climbing voice its progress….

Certain mannerisms occur in his poems sometimes as irritating defects, sometimes as quaint ornament suited to the individual style; and grammatical eccentricities are not lacking.

In the lines so often quoted by dismayed critics,—

The fiend that man harries
Is love of the best;

it is certainly open to the reader to place the accusative where he will, but these lines can hardly be called representative. Even where equally forced inversion occurs elsewhere the meaning is seldom obscured by it. Another peculiarity which gives an air of mediaevalism disliked by exacting critics is the division into two syllables of the ending "ion" and similar endings. But there is nothing really fixed or formal in the poems to give the dialectic mind its opportunity. The description in "Merlin" of the true poet takes the precise outline of Emerson's muse:

Great is the art,
Great be the manners of the bard.
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhythm and number,
But, leaving rule and pale forethought,
He shall aye climb
For his rhyme.
"Pass in, pass in," the angels say,
"In to the upper doors,
Nor count compartments of the floors,
But mount to paradise
By the stairway of surprise."

Surprise is a characteristic element in the larger number of the poems. It piques the imagination and startles the indolent mind, suggesting old truths by fresh figures of speech and furnishing new points of view for poetic thinkers. This perhaps is to be expected in the work of a writer bent upon discarding outworn formulas and the conventions of prosy civilisations. What is remarkable is the extreme beauty of metaphor, paradox, and symbol. It is comparatively easy to be unexpected and nothing is cheaper than the effect when gained merely by the use of unconventional material in language or thought. But beauty, as Emerson knew well, demands an integral idea beneath individual phrases, it demands the curve and balance of interior harmony, a structural expression pervading and accounting for all seeming eccentricity. This first essential was never out of his mind. All his varied rhetoric is chosen to emphasise the unity of man with God and with Nature. Against this noble background his most brilliant colours melt into harmony, his crudest forms appear majestic or at least organic….

Emerson's care to preserve the key-note of joy in being led him frequently to choose epithets with the special aim of suggesting mirth and glee, riotous rejoicing on the part of tree, hill, or planet. The "sportive sun," the World-Soul with cheeks that "mantle with mirth," and Nature "gamesome and good," "merry and manifold," laugh through his poems; "The throbbing sea, the quaking earth, Yield sympathy and signs of mirth," the river is cheerful, the rills are gay, the mystic seasons dance, Love "laughs and on a lion rides," the Spring is merry, the rainbow smiles in showers, and the poet is "Blameless master of the games, King of sport that never shames." Seldom has any such body of verse been so gaily grave, so full at once of dignity and spontaneous joyousness, so eloquent of the spirit which he finds in his forests—

… sober on a fund of joy
The woods at heart are glad.

It is, no doubt, as the outcome of this rich delight in the healthy aspects of nature, that he so often personifies natural objects and brings them into his poetry as living, warm companions, speaking his familiar language, but, instead of sharing his mood, imposing their own mood, a quite different matter from the "pathetic fallacy." Nature herself frequently appears as a beautiful caressing goddess, shedding smiles and friendliness as she walks the earth among her children. What a free charm is in this careless couplet of that chapter in the Poems headed by her name:

But Nature whistled with all her winds,
Did as she pleased and went her way!

… Emerson's lighter poems not seldom reveal a childlike eagerness to learn the pleasant minor lessons of the outdoor world, and he is not his least poetic self when he is apostrophising the "burly dozing humble bee" or the blackberries of his pasture, "Ethiops sweet," but it is when he is making pictures or thinking in music that he rises to heights of poetic style. Nothing that he wrote combines excellent form with high feeling and beautiful imagery more satisfyingly than the austere and vivid lines on "Days" beginning:

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.

This stanza of eleven lines is of an exquisite and noble loveliness which has hardly been surpassed in English verse, never in the verse of Emerson's immediate contemporaries and successors. Its mate in pictorial words, delicate reserve, and imaginative power is "The Rhodora" in which the simplicity of Emerson's deepest thought similes frankly in our faces from his blossoming New England solitudes. These two poems are types of his truest inspiration, embodying as they do his fervent sense of moral responsibility and his bright freedom from didactic moralising. It was while he strolled musing near the haunts of his fair Rhodora that he attained the curious spiritual passion or ecstasy to which at certain moments Nature inspired him; the upspringing of these central fires of feeling which he thanks the God Pan for keeping in control:

Haply else we could not live,
Life would be too wild an ode.

At these moments his pure-minded Bacchus pours "the remembering wine" and fulfils his prayer that he

Refresh the faded tints,
Recut the aged prints,
And write my old adventures with the pen
Which on the first day drew
Upon the tablets blue,
The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.

At these moments he is more the poet of energy, to adopt Matthew Arnold's phraseology, than Wordsworth in his most soaring flight, than Arnold himself at any instant. Mr. Brownell, Arnold's most discerning critic, has said of the latter that he is the poet par excellence of feeling that is legitimated by the tribunal of reason, and he finds his poetry "admirably representative of the combined thought and feeling of the era." "But," he adds of his genius, "it is a reflective and philosophic genius, and accordingly its sincerest poetical expression savours a little of statement rather than of song." It is the opposite of this quality in Emerson's most rapturous poems that presses home the conviction of his essentially poetic genius despite flaw and limitation. Reason is not to him a faculty by which imagination is restrained or crippled; it is the ether in which float all consoling and radiant thoughts, flowing into the human mind from the region of perfect bliss….

Arnold found Wordsworth's superiority in the fact that he dealt with more of life than Burns or Keats or Heine, and dealt with life as a whole more powerfully. If this is true of Wordsworth, as indisputably it is, it is true of Emerson who equally with Wordsworth pursued one object, to "attain inward freedom, serenity, happiness, contentment." Those who have found his poetry fragmentary can hardly have felt in it this moral unity. Already he has his expositors, from whom we learn that his "Brahma" for example, sums up the burden of the Bhagavad's philosophy, and that his reference to the wheel "on which all beings ride" has its origin in the Rig Veda of the Hindoos, and that "the starred eternal worm" may be identified with the stupendous serpent-god of the Hindoos, and we are told how much of his philosophy he has drawn from the East and how much his poetry is steeped in Eastern feeling, but all this seems very far aside from his real poetic achievement. His real poetic achievement lies outside of his borrowings from Eastern religions although this borrowing was characteristically the outcome of his truly poetic desire to unite the deep thought of the world. His real poetic achievement has its source in his power to penetrate the shows of things and reveal their essence. We cannot ignore his poetry because like that of Wordsworth it deals with reality, with the most real of all realities, the indestructible soul of man. If "how to live" is indeed, as Arnold has said, the important teaching of the greatest poets, and if no more than this is needed, we may class Emerson among them without fear, for if we do not learn from his poetry so far as may be learned from any exterior teaching, how to maintain within ourselves the strength of hope and serene intelligent trust and indomitable moral purpose, we are incapable of feeling the "balm of thoughtful words."