… The task of defining Emerson's poetry is difficult because, unlike Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the acknowledged giants of nineteenth-century American poetry, Emerson has no distinctive, original, easily defined style. It has been customary to borrow Emerson's own favorite organic metaphor and condemn him on just this ground, that his poetry never ripened and blossomed into unique, distinctive expression; in other words, that he never found himself as a poet. The charge carries some truth; Emerson was, after all, a diffident, often dissatisfied experimenter, as he himself wrote:

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which I now see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages…. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back. ["Circles"]

And this is perhaps most evident in his poetry.

Given an avowed experimenter, one would plausibly approach his work chronologically, charting the course of successive experiments and thus elucidating at least the pattern, if not an end product, called "Emerson's style." Such an approach neatly parallels the current view of Emerson that looks to the "man thinking" rather than to "Emerson's philosophy," and the emphasis placed, since the study by Stephen Whicher, on the inner process of Emerson's life. Unfortunately for this method relatively few of Emerson's poems can be dated with certainty, and many were composed over a period of years, sometimes ten or more. Nevertheless, I think, some sense can be made of the larger pattern of Emerson's poetic development, based on the approximate dates that we have. Ultimately it is not the exact chronological order that matters so much—there are, in the whole body of his poetry, numerous instances that bear out the passages from "Circles" just quoted, that show us what he writes today may not suit yesterday or tomorrow. And yet, I shall argue, in the whole context these particular inconsistencies will be "rounded by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere" ["Emerson, Self-Reliance"]. Thus, from a roughly chronological viewpoint, we can see a pattern in Emerson's poetry that takes its shape from the essential changes in his thought and especially from the fundamental shift in emphasis that must have occurred about 1840, a change that has come to mark the distinction between the "early" and the "later" Emerson.

An exhaustive study would show how Emerson moved from an undergraduate's imitation of Augustan couplets to a variety of less polished and less constraining verse forms—ballads, epigrammatic quatrains, Wordsworthian blank verse in 1827, and the extraordinary if ungainly "Gnothi Seauton" of 1831, lines that are as unorthodox in form as they are in doctrine, and that prefigure Emerson's settled practices of a decade later. Emerson was not, however, consciously preparing himself for a poetic career. The role of his journal poetry is unquestionably self-expression, dialogue with oneself—moving away from the style of performance toward a means of formulating one's private convictions, or, as Leslie Fiedler has suggested [in Waiting for the End, 1964], toward "the speech of a man urging himself on, rather than appealing to a crowd." To summarize these early experiments we may say that Emerson sought a mode of expression appropriate to the essentially meditative aim of this writing. Not surprisingly, he turned finally to Wordsworth, whose star was just rising on this side of the Atlantic in the late 1820s, and to the Metaphysical tradition of meditative verse, especially to the poetry of George Herbert.

"The River," dated June 1827 in the Centenary Edition [of The Complete Works of RWE, 1903-04], and the following lines from Emerson's journal are unmistakably Wordsworthian in setting and cadence:

Associated with Wordsworth's rural solitary is a language sincere and unpretentious, that comes spontaneously from the heart. Emerson's admiration for Herbert over a period of at least seven years culminates in the 1835 lectures, where Herbert is placed foremost among English poets: "I should cite Herbert as a striking example of the power of exalted thought to melt and bend language to its fit expression." Undoubtedly in Herbert—in the "Jordan" poems, for example—Emerson also found an ideal of simple, heartfelt poetry. Herbert's contribution is larger, however, for Herbert provided a model, not merely for simplicity of speech and imagery, but for combining that simplicity with architectonic skill, with the concentrated and integrated organization that distinguishes the seventeenth-century meditative style, just as it distinguishes Emerson's poetry of 1834 from the prosaic, discursive blank verse and free verse that dots his journals between 1827 and 1832. "Each and All," "The Rhodora," and "The Snow-Storm" are among the most admired of Emerson's poems. What they owe to Herbert is not explicit, but the debt is clear enough in another poem probably written about this time and later taken for Herbert's own work.

     "Grace"

How much, preventing God, how much I owe
To the defences thou hast round me set;
Example, custom, fear, occasion slow,—
These scorned bondmen were my parapet.
I dare not peep over this parapet
To gauge with glance the roaring gulf below,
The depths of sin to which I had descended,
Had not these me against myself defended.

Here, as John Broderick has shown, is a direct parallel with the first line of Herbert's "Sinne," "Lord! with what care hast thou begirt us round." Moreover, the retard effected by the naming or cataloging device in the third line is characteristic of Herbert and may also have been taken over from the catalog somewhat more extended in "Sinne" (though cataloging is a common enough technique among seventeenth-century poets, and Emerson may have found precedents in Milton, Herrick, or even the American William Bradford). [As discussed by Louis Martz in The Poetry of Meditation, 1962] personification of the defenses as "scorned bondmen" calls to mind Herbert's specific recommendation [in his work Country Parson] that "things of ordinary use" ought to illustrate "Heavenly Truths." This advice Emerson never forgot; the bondmen of "Grace" reappear constantly in his poetry, importing truths well above their station. The "drudge in dusty frock" who appears in "Art" has been compared to Herbert's servant in "The Elixir," a poem that Emerson especially admired, and the stooped crones who sweep and scour the poet's cottage in "Saadi" are suddenly transformed into gods. Thus there is no doubt about Herbert's influence. More generally—and here I think we can include the poems of 1834 as having the same qualities—Emerson learned from Herbert, and perhaps from some of his contemporaries, the art of "neatness": the way to structure a poem on a single metaphor or situation, the way "Grace" is based on the figure of a fortress; the smoothness of tone and rhythm, conversational but always melodic, never jagged but sufficiently pointed and varied to gain the quality of speech, as in the catalog or in the stressed pronouns ("these me") which give the last line of "Grace" a peak before it falls off to the diminished feminine ending.

"The Rhodora," one of the 1834 poems, displays the same neat structure and rhythm as "Grace," again modulated by a feminine rhyme that sets off the gnomic couplet, and by the deliberateness of the last line with its hyphenated adjective, monosyllabic parallelism, and pointed pronouns. "The Rhodora" conveys, too, the humility and intense dedication that Emerson and Herbert shared. One might go further to argue that Emerson's poem deploys the formal structure of seventeenth-century meditation, beginning with the composition or focusing upon a concrete situation and proposing of the spiritual problem therein dramatized; following with an analysis of the problem; and ending in the colloquy, an intimate conversation and union between the poet and the object of his spiritual exercise. But here I think the essential difference between Emerson and the Metaphysicals is evident: whereas the meditative formula is triadic, the structure of "The Rhodora" is clearly binary, two sets of eight lines each. In the first, the situation is posed and the question implied (actually stated already in the subtitle of the poem); in the second, an answer is given immediately, without any deliberation, and the answer itself eschews analysis:

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

The rhodora needs no reasoned argument, no "excuse" for its existence. In terms of the meditative formula, we have only "composition" and "colloquy," two parts subtly intertwined. The first part of the poem portrays the rhodora as a humble, self-sacrificing flower which, though equal to the celebrated rose, prefers obscure service to worldy fame. Sacrifice and service are implied, almost to the point of martyrdom, in the fallen petals. In the last eight lines the poet identifies himself with the same Christian virtues: his "simple ignorance" is faith, if not in Providence, certainly in a wise and sensitive Creator; the worshipful humility which the poet and the flower share explains their intimate rapport. The philosophical sages, on the other hand, are shut out; as the flower leans toward Christian sacrifice, the sages are associated with self-seeking, utilitarian interests, perhaps even cavalier interests, who see the flower's charm as "wasted." Thus a dramatic undercurrent—the subtle alliance of poet and flower against the sages—helps to create a mood of religious dedication that excludes the inquiring, analytical mind, and at the same time militates against a narrowly esthetic, "beauty for beauty's sake" interpretation of the poem.

In a number of ways "The Rhodora" is consonant with Emerson's achievement in Nature (1836). Both works illustrate the attention to structure, the eye for neatness and symmetry, that Emerson cultivated during these years. Herbert, probably Emerson's chief model for the poetry of 1834, is also one of the inspiring spirits of Nature, where a large portion of "Man" is quoted. There is a well-known passage concluding the section of Nature on "Beauty" that bears out the message of "The Rhodora": "This element [Beauty] I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair." Finally, the binary structure of the poem reflects, in its omission of any extended analysis, Emerson's attack on the Understanding in Nature….

In the years between 1836 and 1839 Emerson attempted to work out his theory of nature, mainly in lectures that formed the basis for his later published essays. As far as we know, he wrote little poetry (of his major poems, only "The Humble-Bee" is traditionally assigned to 1837) and did not publish what he had already written. Suddenly in 1839 he decided to publish some of his early poems, including "The Rhodora" and "Each and All," which he sent to James Freeman Clarke's Western Messenger; and for the first time Emerson thought of himself as a poet, not merely as a writer of private, meditative verses. Why he had to become a poet, in the broadest sense, is explained in a significant journal passage from 1839:

As the musician avails himself of the concert, so the philosopher avails himself of the drama, the epic, the novel, and becomes a poet; for these complex forms allow of the utterance of his knowledge of life by indirections as well as in the didactic way, and can therefore express the fluxional quantities and values which the thesis or dissertation could never give. [Journals of RWE, 1909-14]

By 1840 the Heraclitean notion of flux, the fluidity of all real substance which is eternally becoming, had washed away a considerable portion of correspondence, and Emerson had entered upon his skeptical mood. In Nature the settled "order of things" had been grounded in the belief that "every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind" and "there is nothing lucky or capricious in these analogies." In contrast to this rather fixed Swedenborgian correspondence, the flux of words as well as things is paramount in Emerson's journal of 1841:

The metamorphosis of Nature shows itself in nothing more than this, that there is no word in our language that cannot become typical to us of Nature by giving it emphasis. The world is a Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a Boat; a Mist; a Spider's Snare; it is what you will; and the metaphor will hold, and it will give the imagination keen pleasure. Swifter than light the world converts itself into that thing you name, and all things find their right place under this new and capricious classification. There is nothing small or mean to the soul. It derives as grand a joy from symbolizing the Godhead or his universe under the form of a moth or a gnat as of a Lord of Hosts. Must I call the heaven and the earth a maypole and country fair with booths, or an anthill, or an old coat, in order to give you the shock of pleasure which the imagination loves and the sense of spiritual greatness? Call it a blossom, a rod, a wreath of parsley, a tamarisk-crown, a cock, a sparrow, the ear instantly hears and the spirit leaps to the trope. [Journals of RWE, 1909-14]

The analogy that was in 1836 neither "lucky or capricious" is now exactly that; the symbol held up earlier as knowledge of a discrete world is now offered for its "shock of pleasure," the surprising kaleidoscopic insights it gives. Symbolic language is still a kind of knowledge—indeed, perhaps the only kind of knowledge—but valuable now because things are free rather than fixed, and because no one set of correspondences is adequate to express Nature—"the slippery Proteus is not so easily caught" "[Emerson, "Swedenborg; or the Mystic"].

The doctrine of flux, with its corollary that all inquiry is essentially poetic or metaphorical, liberated Emerson even further from traditional analogies and accepted forms. His most rhapsodic language, in prose or verse, belongs to this moment of enthusiasm and newly sensed freedom. "Poets are thus liberating gods," he repeats in his dithyrambic essay "The Poet," and the kind of verse he expected to issue from this concept of poetry is implied in the well-known journal passage of 1839 calling for "grand Pindaric strokes, as firm as the tread of a horse" or "the stroke of a cannon ball"—"I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom." This is the poetic program Emerson attempted to carry out in such poems as "Woodnotes" (especially the second part), "Merlin," and "Bacchus," and it is the essential link between Emerson and Whitman.

What becomes apparent, in the full context of Emerson's poetic development, is how brief this enthusiastic moment was, and that alone it cannot serve as the basis for a definition of Emerson's poetic style. The exhilaration of the moment was undermined by Emerson's growing skepticism, that other side of the doctrine of flux that implies an endless, wandering circularity; and his buoyant mood was abruptly cut off by the death of his son Waldo in 1842. The poetic program of 1839-41 clearly displaced Herbert, or even Wordsworth, as a model. Emerson looked then to other sources that corroborated his ideas about poetic freedom, mainly to older traditions, the poetry of Saadi and Hafiz, the Vedas, and the ancient British bards. The last, in particular, offer an important source for explicit ideas about poetic technique. In Sharon Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons Emerson learned that abrupt transitions, clipped syntax, periphrasis, and repeated epithets were all characteristic of the ancient bards, and that they used no rules for meter, "consulting only the natural love of melody." Very likely he also read Longfellow's anthology The Poets and Poetry of Europe, published in 1845. In an essay introducing his own translations of Anglo-Saxon lyrics, Longfellow noted especially

the short exclamatory lines, whose rhythm depends on alliteration in the emphatic syllables, and to which the general omission of particles gives great energy and vivacity. Though alliteration predominates in all Anglo-Saxon poetry, rhyme is not wholly wanting…. [Rhyme and alliteration] brought so near together in the short, emphatic lines, produce a singular effect upon the ear. They ring like blows of hammers on an anvil.

Much that Turner and Longfellow describe appears frequently in Emerson's published poems, yet the best evidence that he imitated the metrical half-line, periphrasis, and alliteration of the Anglo-Saxons is in a manuscript trial beginning "Poet of poets / Is Time, the distiller, / Chemist, refiner"

All through the countryside
Rush locomotives:
Prosperous grocers
Posing in newspapers
Over their shopfires
Settle the State.
But, for the Poet,—
Seldom in centuries
Comes the well-tempered
Musical Man….
Free of the city,
Free of the [field] [meadow] forest
Knight of each order,
Sworn of each guild
Fellow of monarchs,
And, what is better
[Fellow] Mate of all men.
[Brackets indicate words crossed out.]

The corrections show that Emerson consciously sought alliteration, and the general mood and descriptive effects of this passage are reminiscent of the Old English lyric. It is a heroic style to fit Emerson's heroic program—and if the passage were written as full four-stress lines (instead of half-lines) and given rhyme, which Emerson thought an essential and primitive quality of poetry, the result would be similar to the staccato tetrameters that are so common in the Poems of 1846….

Here, then, is the full movement of Emerson's thinking about what a poem should be: it crystallizes, somewhere between 1834 and 1836, in the idea of a precisely organized, meditative poem modeled after Herbert; it shifts, just before 1840, to an enthusiastic vision of wild, bardic freedom; and it subsides quickly in the 1840's toward a concept of poetry more restrained in tone though not necessarily in form, more serene and detached, and more oblique in its announcements of universal truth.

Inevitably, given the man he was, Emerson's aeolian verses obeyed the winds of thought, so that any discussion of his poetry during its major phase (roughly from 1839 to 1847) must consider the development of his ideas that I have just traced. Generally, the function of his poetry can still be described as meditative, and for a great many of these poems the binary question-and-answer form remains the structural framework on which he built. But there are important differences: appropriately, for expression that is free and spontaneous, Emerson moves toward a much looser form of meditation than that of the 1834 poems. He favors shorter, compressed units of thought, reflected in the choice of meters and the often cryptic or elliptical syntax; his rhythms and language are easy and informal; and the arguments are less explicit, often depending more on imagery than on direct and logical statement. Sometimes it seems, in fact, that Emerson is trying to bring his poetry closer to the actual processes of thought, to create what we today might see as a rudimentary "stream of consciousness" technique.

Such a change can be illustrated by comparing two well-known poems, "Each and All," one of the poems of 1834, and "The Problem," probably written in 1839. Few of Emerson's works are as highly structured as "Each and All," which is carefully divided into parts and then subdivided into instances or images. One can, with some justice, claim that the poem exemplifies the characteristic binary form of the poet's encounter with nature, given over first to his doubts or problem (here the need for proof of Nature's wise aphorism "All are needed by each one; / Nothing is fair or good alone") and then to nature's answer (the last ten lines in which the poet sees the truth without having it proved in any discursive way); and so conceived it shows, as "The Rhodora" did, the fundamental distinction between Emerson and the Metaphysicals: for Emerson, analysis is not a means to revelation. The long middle of the poem, which might be taken as an "analysis" of the type appropriate to the seventeenth-century meditative structure, does not lead to the resolution, but curiously to a point where the poet would have discarded beauty in favor of truth. Only in the end, when the poet is taken by surprise, does he realize that truth, beauty, and goodness are not isolated elements but aspects of a "perfect whole." Though rare, this experience is not unknown, for the poet exclaims, "Again I saw, again I heard," recalling lines from another visionary poet whose moments of insight counteract the light of common day. Like Wordsworth's in the "Immortality Ode," Emerson's vision in "Each and All" counteracts the common experiences enumerated in the middle of the poem from which the poet infers that beauty is a cheat. The poet's inference is wrong, of course, but it is a legitimate inference given the facts at hand, and his making it dramatizes the weakness and dangers inherent in the analytic method: inference or induction, that is, generalizing from a series of instances, is the way of the Understanding; only direct and intuitive experience "through my senses" brings the positive truth home.

In the style of 1834 and like the poems of Herbert, "Each and All" is precisely worked out, an arrangement of discrete parts in a deliberate pattern. Admirable as it is, this formal coherence does have its price—a felt loss in vitality, perhaps, and the friction of such deliberateness in method rubbing against the spontaneity finally endorsed by the poem. As obviously as "Each and All" is composed, "The Problem" is a casual arrangement, its parts more like beads loosely connected on a string than pieces neatly fitted together. It is a poem of meditation on a matter of great personal concern to Emerson, contrasting again with "Each and All" where the theme is more philosophical and objective. From its beginning "The Problem" strikes a note of sincerity and simplicity, of the direct rendering of personal feeling:

I like a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles:
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowled churchman be.

So brief and straightforward a statement is underlined by the simple, balanced tetrameter and the easy rhymes, and the impression of unreserved candor is always enhanced when one admits liking what one cannot approve. Set beside these the first lines of "Each and All," the relative contrivance of the latter is evident: "Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown / Of thee from the hill-top looking down"—despite the rhyme the movement here is of studied blank verse, complicated by inversions and enjambment. Development in "The Problem" strengthens the impression that the poem is working out an explanation, not dramatizing one already made. Questions help to break up the pattern of assertion, the arguments are cumulative rather than logical, and the conclusion falls off instead of rising, an abrupt repetition of the opening lines that seems to say, "Even if the explanation has been incomplete or logically unsatisfactory, my conviction remains unchanged." Again, by comparison, the conclusion of "Each and All" is staged, more theatrical than dramatic.

Both poems touch upon the relation of beauty to truth. "Each and All" reflects Emerson's early faith in a "perfect whole" that unites beauty with truth and goodness; it suggests the same predilection for abstract or philosophical symmetry that we observed in the doctrine of correspondence and in Nature. "The Problem," like the 1839 journal passage in which the philosopher becomes a poet shifts from philosophical to esthetic, from transcendent to natural standards. Revelation, according to the argument summarized in the couplet "One accent of the Holy Ghost / The heedless world hath never lost," is available at all times and to all creeds; it is in this sense natural rather than sectarian, identified with passionate acts of creation rather than with statements of belief or dogma. The point of accumulating examples in the body of the poem is to grant "an equal date," that is, equal authority, to both pagan and Christian forms in every era. The assertion that revelation is equally available throws new light on the question Emerson asks himself: why must he insist, in the poem, upon his difference from the bishop, or why, in actual life, did he resign from the church if the way of the priest and the way of the seer are just different paths to the same truth? The answer is that Emerson's touchstone here is beauty, not truth; religion is appealing because it creates beauty—he likes the rhythm of church aisles and Taylor's words "are music in my ear." The revelation available to Phidias, the Delphic oracle, and Michelangelo, as well as to divines, is really artistic inspiration drawn from natural forms. Emerson might still have squared with the bishop if he had introduced the analogy between man's art and God's divine artistry in creating the natural world. But in Emerson's view, art does not create nature, rather nature creates works of art:

These temples grew as grows the grass;
Art might obey, but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned;
And the same power that reared the shrine
Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.

The "passive Master" fills the role of Emerson's artist, not the orthodox theologian's conception of Jesus or God the Creator. Art and the artist must find their place within the order of nature, and that order, illustrated on all levels in the poem, is development from inside outward and from below upward. "Up from the burning core below" all things are "outbuilt." The individualist and evolutionary implications of such an order are difficult to reconcile with episcopal office, and this imagery of direction or thrust justifies Emerson's making his churchman specifically a bishop.

The structural and conceptual changes illustrated by "The Problem" reflect, in part, Emerson's enthusiastic poetic program of 1839, and although one would hardly call the protagonist of that poem "bardic," many of the same principles are applied in the poems that best represent the bardic program. A second important development in Emerson's major phase is the way he modifies the situation and tone in his central encounter between the poet and nature. This, I think, reflects not only his enthusiasm of 1839, but more significantly the doctrine of flux and Emerson's growing skepticism in the years after 1841.

The personality of the poet was a matter of long and serious concern which Emerson tried to resolve in poems, essays, and even in bits of fiction scattered through the journals. Much of the character of the emerging poetfigure is clearly autobiographical and an attempt to state his own concept of the poet's role. But gradually Emerson loosened the identification between himself and the character he created, so that in his later essays, as Whicher pointed out, there are a number of dramatic characters or alter egos who speak for different, often opposite, sets of ideas. And often Emerson was able to heighten the dramatic situation instead of the philosophical resolution in his poems, such as in "Hamatreya" and "Days."

In the earlier poems the poet-figure is an active and relentless seeker of truth. Whatever frustrations he encounters, there is nevertheless an air of certainty that he is on the right track in verse like the "Dull uncertain brain, / But gifted yet to know" fragment. In "The Poet" he is the bard who will pierce through to central truth, and like the poet-figure of the Ion and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is set apart from other men…. Plagued by having heard only a "random word" and not the whole truth, this poet suffers prolonged periods of despair (the poem's original title was "The Discontented Poet, A Masque"). He complains, in effect, that the law of the spirit is not kept as faithfully as the law that regulates nature. The Chorus of Spirits answer, first, that they and he are brothers by nature and no one can violate his own nature; second, that no one serves the spirit out of physical compulsion or simply to be rewarded, but out of penury and love:

Serve thou it not for daily bread,—
Serve it for pain and fear and need.
Love it, though it hide its light;
By love behold the sun at night.
If the Law should thee forget,
More enamoured serve it yet …

Emerson took great pains with this poem and worked on it for some ten years, but he could never finish it. The reason may well be that the poem moves insistently toward a final resolution, but Emerson was never satisfied by any of the answers he could write for the Chorus of Spirits. The second answer given above is already tinged with the doubts of 1842. Emerson stressed the message, in earlier poems with a binary framework, by putting straightforward answers into Nature's mouth. In the "Dirge" for his brothers Edward and Charles, which Emerson completed in 1838, the resolution is a "tale divine" told in the song of a bird, more consolatory than philosophical, but explaining why the poet cannot tell others of his deep grief. The same can be said of "Threnody," Emerson's elegy for his son Waldo. A poem written during the later skeptical years (between 1842 and 1845), "Threnody" nevertheless posed questions so painful that only a full resolution in the manner of 1834-36 could console the grieving father. Thus "Threnody" is a perfect example of the binary form illustrated in "The Rhodora": the first part is the poet's lament, the second—possibly modeled after God's answer to Job—rebukes analysis and offers the consolation of unquestioning faith. "To Rhea" and "Woodnotes," whose second part concludes with the most explicit statement Nature gives in any of the poems, belong to the same classification.

Most frequently after 1840, however, Nature is anything but explicit. The poem "Nature" (not published until 1867) reveals the relationship between art and nature that is implicit in "The Problem." In it Nature is witty and baffling; her chief tools are "Casualty and Surprise," and she is "all things to all men," deceiving them with the illusion of freedom while they inevitably do her bidding. She takes on a secretive and moody aspect, and deliberately taunts men for their ignorance of her mysteries….

… In most of the later poems it is no longer so easy for Emerson to identify with the bard piercing through to truth; rather, he is like a spectator who knows where to look but waits for someone more heroic than himself to do the job. "Monadnoc," completed sometime between 1845 and its publication in the volume of 1846, should be compared with an earlier poem of similar design, "Woodnotes," published in two parts in The Dial, 1840-41. Both are essentially of the question-and-answer type, encounters between a poet-figure and Nature represented by the mountain or the pine tree. The long monologue of the pine in the second part of "Woodnotes" directly answers the foresterhero, and while the concept of nature as flux is invoked, the poem resolves on the theme of unity ordained by "conscious Law," a law personified as "God" the creator and the "eternal Pan." There is no hint of an observer apart from the forester, who is Emerson's primitive poet, "philosopher," "minstrel," "forest seer"; and nothing is equivocal or complex about the pine tree's role as Nature's spokesman. In "Monadnoc," however, as in "The Sphinx," the "I" of the poem (with whom Emerson identifies) is separate: the protagonist of Monadnoc stands as an observer midway between the "spruce clerk" type of the urban tourists who daily climb the mountain in summer and the heroic "bard and sage" whom the mountain awaits. The claims of the mountain are significantly more cautious than those of the pine: the order it hints of is the flux behind solid-seeming things, which is only the first stage of reality in "Woodnotes II." Monadnoc itself belongs to this order; it obeys the law expressed by the gnomic paradox "Adamant is soft to wit," and therefore it will dissolve when the apocalyptic hero comes to solve the riddle of its being:

And when the greater comes again
With my secret in his brain,
I shall pass as glides my shadow
Daily over hill and meadow.

The secret of the mountain is essentially a scientific account of its nature and origin. Common sense and simple observation see only a solid pyramid, but the mind probes deeper into this mass and "in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed, / Shall string Monadnoc like a bead." Emerson's repeated image for the ordering of matter is a string of beads:

… these gray crags
Not on crags are hung,
But beads are of a rosary
On prayer and music strung.

The basis for this image is explicated in "Poetry and Imagination"—

Thin or solid, everything is in flight. I believe this conviction makes the charm of chemistry,—that we have the same avoirdupois matter in an alembic, without a vestige of the old form; and in animal transformation not less, as in grub and fly, in egg and bird, in embryo and man; everything undressing and stealing away from its old into new form, and nothing fast but those invisible cords which we call laws, on which all is strung.

The beads represent bits of matter, impermanent cohesions and not things-in-themselves; the material world is not built stone upon stone, it is hung upon a string, an organizing principle that corresponds to the divine Idea or Law and gives to the whole image the religious efficacy of a rosary. The string is also a fitting emblem for the concept of rhyme that Emerson defined in the wider sense of any rhythmic pattern. The material universe is really an intellectual dance for which "Rhyme [is] the pipe, and Time the warder." All things begin and end in motion, the mountain itself having begun as "chemic eddies," finally rising "with inward fires and pain" like "a bubble from the plain," all according to the geological theory of upheavals that Emerson had set forth in his early lectures. At its end, the mountain "shall throb," and metaphorically it becomes a monster slain not by the sword but by the song of a "troubadour" who will "string" up the carcass on his rhyme. Then, Monadnoc prophesies, like a whale or volcano,

… I shall shed
From this wellspring in my head,
Fountain-drop of spicier worth
Than all vintage of the earth.

Then the sacramental liquid, what in "Bacchus" is called the true wine of remembering, will be reclaimed by man.

The curious thing about "Monadnoc" is that the poetobserver who concludes the poem disregards what the mountain has prophesied. This may be because he is not the heroic bard of the future and has been, from the start, concerned with the practical and immediate effect of Monadnoc upon the people who live there, hoping that the mountain would be "their life's ornament, / And mix itself with each event." For him the mountain already dislimns by "Pouring many a cheerful river," which in turn offer practical gifts to the inhabitants. In the final apostrophe to Monadnoc the protagonist is still concerned with the immediately practical, what he calls "pure use." The epithet, surely paradoxical to the Romantic mind, is appropriate because what the poet is trying to define is the fruit or harvest of the "barren cone," the mountain's top above the timberline. The passage then floods in paradoxes—stones that flower, the "sumptuous indigence" of man, the "plenties" of the "barren mound," and the mountain described as an "opaker star" and finally as a "Mute orator." The point made by the poet-observer is that, notwithstanding the mountain's own prediction that it will someday disintegrate, Monadnoc's rocky summit is for men a "type of permanence." It is, too, a religious temple to comfort men's "insect miseries," and no less a "complement" of the erect human form with mind at its summit. Indeed, the triangular shape leading to an apex is a symbol of all progress toward unity, hence of the One or the Good which is now introduced in terms similar to those of "Woodnotes II":

Thou … imagest the stable good
For which we all our lifetime grope,
In shifting form the formless mind,
And though the substance us elude,
We in thee the shadow find.

This statement is, however, much more limited: the substance or reality of the Good, which is formless, we can never know; but it is shadowed forth in all the changing forms of nature, most clearly in the large, stable objects which seem to us to change least. The use of the mountain, then, is purely symbolical, but in a world where motion is ever faster and more frivolous this symbolic role, recalling us in wayside moments and making us sane, is actually more practical than all its physical bounties. This is the thematic paradox at the center of a number of paradoxes evoked in the last section of the poem.

Thus "Monadnoc" is a more complicated poem than "Woodnotes," and more suited to Emerson's later thought. It is resolved by the poet-observer distinct from the heroic bard and as concerned about everyday life as about apocalyptic revelation. While the pine tree, a surrogate for Nature, was merely a spokesman for the doctrine of the poem, the mountain wholly displaces doctrine as a center of interest, and the poet-observer recognizes it as a complex symbol of something that cannot be expressed by any other means. Again, to use Emerson's own formula, philosophy becomes poetry, the fluid symbolism of art replaces the more rigid symbolism of correspondence, in the transition from the earlier to the later poem.

As the poet-hero matures into the poet-observer, the ecstatic joy that Emerson expected poetry to release subsides into the tamer qualities of cheerfulness and serenity. The poet's quest and assault, which would have explained all of nature in 1836, turns into a strategy of wit, oblique counterpunching, and finally into appreciative acceptance. Uriel is a truth-seeker, to be sure, but heis a young, mischievous rebel, whereas the protagonist of "The Poet" is ageless and solemn. Uriel's sentiments are gnomic hints whose purpose in the poem is to shatter old decrees and formulas, not to create new ones, and thus Emerson is not pressed for the kind of ultimate answer that he felt obliged to provide in "Woodnotes" or "Threnody." The same qualities are found in the main speaker of Emerson's short "Fable," a poem based on the question-and-answer form but almost entirely given over to the squirrel's retort to the bullying mountain. The squirrel is spry in word and deed, and he turns the tables on the mountain with Emerson's doctrine of compensation disguised as New England wisecracking:

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.

This smaller voice, full of Yankee cadences and concealing its power in understatement and shafts of oblique wit, is heard frequently in the later quatrains and in poems like "Berrying," "Hamatreya," and "The Titmouse." Merlin is a heroic bard drawn from the legendary past, and the Merlin poems are perhaps the best verse explanations of Emerson's theory of "wildest freedom" in poetry; yet Merlin is not preoccupied with the search for truth or for any answers Nature might give to his questions. His business is primarily social rather than intellectual, a "blameless master of the games" and "king of sport" who dispenses joy and peace to men. Apparently he is not bothered, as the Poet was, by "unhappy times" when inspiration is lax. Hence truth seeks him ("the God's will sallies free") and in the moment of revelation at the end of "Merlin I" finds him effortless and "unawares." "Saadi," although an earlier poem than "Merlin," goes even further in making its protagonist a passive figure, so that Saadi may well stand as the exemplary version of Emerson's later poetic personality. Saadi is the bard and sage mellowed by experience. He sits alone, self-reliant in his complete inactivity—

Many may come,
But one shall sing;
Two touch the string,
The harp is dumb.
Though there come a million,
Wise Saadi dwells alone.

But, like Merlin, he is socially concerned, ever gentle and cheerful to his fellowmen, especially to the "simple maids and noble youth" who need him most. The doctrine of the "sad-eyed Fakirs," a melange of sin and gloom echoing Marvell, the graveyard school, and Byron, is quickly countered by Saadi's effortless optimism: "For Saadi sat in the sun, / And thanks was his contrition." Like Emerson's other poems, "Saadi" rises to a peak of intense, momentary vision. But characteristic of the later Emerson, Saadi's truth lies within, not beyond his natural world, in the rule of moderation and the common proverbs of the marketplace: "Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind," his Thoreauvian Muse advises him. As in "Merlin I" the opening of doors symbolizes a revelation of heavenly truth. But the Muse bluntly tells Saadi, "Those doors are men," and suddenly, for the poet who has not lifted a finger, men are transformed into gods—

While thou sittest at thy door
On the desert's yellow floor,
Listening to the gray-haired crones,
Foolish gossips, ancient drones,
Saadi, see! they rise in stature
To the height of mighty Nature,
And the secret stands revealed
Fraudulent Time in vain concealed,—
That blessed gods in servile masks
Plied for thee thy household tasks.

Not stars or a Chorus of Spirits, not the eternal ideas or sublime objects of nature, but ordinary life redeems the poet….

… In a less touted achievement of these years, "The Titmouse" (written and published in 1862), Nature gives no explicit philosophy or lesson except the bird's example of cheerful stoicism in the face of great odds. The little titmouse echoes Saadi and the squirrel of "Fable," and in keeping with the symbolist view of the world as flux, the "antidote of fear" is a matter of playing on words—of leaping to the great conceit that ends the poem, where the bird's song "Chic-a-dee-dee" is recast as Caesar's "Veni, vidi, vici." The essential transformation or metamorphosis in life is poetic, and we can make it if only we heed the moral of the poem:

I think no virtue goes with size;
The reason of all cowardice
Is, that men are overgrown,
And, to be valiant, must come down
To the titmouse dimension.

Reduce! Simplify! Concentrate one's awareness—Thoreau was on Emerson's mind in the early spring of 1862—and thus accommodate the eye to the ordinary world. Were we to judge by "The Titmouse" alone, we might conclude that Emerson in later years had solved the problem of the "double consciousness" by trading in his "flash-of-lighting faith" on the continuous, if less spectacular, light of common day. For the great spiritual analogies of Correspondence, bequeathed by Nature in flashes of insight, have no place in this brief tale of wintry courage.

If the poems treated in this essay do represent his poetry as a whole, then clearly the pattern of Emerson's poetry corresponds to the more general development of his thought, moving away from a neat, formal organization toward a loosely connected, casual arrangement. Moreover, his major phase as a poet coincides with a period of growing doubt and detachment, so that these poems, in form as well as substance, show increasing signs of man's limitations, his perplexity in the face of incomprehensible nature, and, at best, his serenity despite his inability to comprehend. This is perhaps why Emerson's poetry appealed so much to Robert Frost—indeed, much of "Hamatreya" and a poem like "The Titmouse" are the essence of Frost—and why it is increasingly meaningful to the young and the nonspecialists who are often put off by his prose. Often the rhetoric of Emerson's essays is too assured, too conscious of the audience it manipulates, and Emerson seems to look down at us from his podium, himself a genteel Sphinx. His poetry was not this kind of performance, and here he is more commonly on our side, a less pretentious yet representative man, trying with us to sort out the terrible mysteries of this world.

If a single epithet can capture the special quality of Emerson's style, or the direction in which he moved, that one adjective might be "compressed": his tendency was toward compression in both form and consciousness, to concentrate on the small and common experience and relax the grander claims of the formulating intellect—in Emerson's phrase, to "come down to the titmouse dimension." It seems to me therefore that, granting the importance of an apocalyptic imagination and motif for some of Emerson's poems and most of his essays, nevertheless the poetry as a whole points away from that high Romantic vision. I suggest, too, that despite the established link between their ideas, Emerson and Whitman are very dissimilar poets, Whitman's cosmic consciousness and expansive verse standing almost at the extreme from Emerson's. Thus, Emerson's place in our tradition is not, with Whitman, at the head of the "Dionysian strain of American poetry" [Albert Gelpi, Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet, 1965] for, as both [H. H.] Waggoner and [Leslie] Fiedler have observed, his poetry must register a very different influence from Whitman's, and in fact did, upon poets like Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Robinson, and Frost, who are his direct descendants [Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present, 1968, and Fielder, Waiting for the End, 1964]. Much as he contributed to Whitman's bardism, Emerson's more important legacy is his compressed style and the dramatic encounter between his small protagonist and unknowable Nature.