'A LETTER' POEM BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, went to Harvard, completed his studies for the min-istry and became, in 1830, the sole pastor of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston. A crisis of faith caused him to resign his position in 1833 and to strike out on his own. The great American essayist and orator thought himself a poet first but wrote his truest poetry in his prose. In retrospect, such indispensable essays as "Self-Reliance," "Nature," "Compensation," and "The Poet" seem to contain a series of predictions and prophecies that have come to pass. Emerson seems sometimes to have invented, or at least envisioned, American literature as an entity unto itself rather than as a tributary of a mainstream English or British tradition. Read Walt Whitman in the light of Emerson's essays and you see a pattern. Emerson will make a robust declaration in aphoristic prose ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines") and Whitman will take the same sen-
timent and turn it into a lyric cry ("Do I contradict myself?/Very well then. .. . I contradict myself./I am large. .. . I contain multitudes"). Whitman acknowledged the debt: "I was sim-mering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil." It is irresistible to quote Emerson, the "sage of Concord." The American "bard," he wrote, must "mount to paradise/By the stairway of surprise." On the autonomy of the self: "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide." On love: "From the necessity of loving none are exempt, and he that loves must utter his desires." On death: "I think we may be sure that, whatever may come after death, no one will be disappointed."
'A Letter' Poem
Dear brother, would you know the life,
Please God, that I would lead?
On the first wheels that quit this weary town
Over yon western bridges I would ride
And with a cheerful benison forsake
Each street and spire and roof incontinent.
Then would I seek where God might guide my steps,
Deep in a woodland tract, a sunny farm,
Amid the mountain counties, Hant, Franklin, Berks,
Where down the rock ravine a river roars,
Even from a brook, and where old woods
Not tamed and cleared cumber the ground
With their centennial wrecks.
Find me a slope where I can feel the sun
And mark the rising of the early stars.
There will I bring my books, — my household gods,
The reliquaries of my dead saint, and dwell
In the sweet odor of her memory.
Then in the uncouth solitude unlock
My stock of art, plant dials in the grass,
Hang in the air a bright thermometer
And aim a telescope at the inviolate sun.
