Poet
TO clothe the fiery thought
In simple words succeeds.
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds.
Gardener
TRUE Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet,
Expound the Vedas of the violet,
Or, hid in vines, peeping through many a loop,
See the plum redden, and the beurré stoop.
Heri, Cras, Hodie
SHINES the last age, the next with hope is seen,
To-day slinks poorly off, unmarked between:
Future or Past no richer secret folds,
O friendless Present, than thy bosom holds.
Casella
TEST of the poet is knowledge of love,
For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove;
Never was poet, of late or of yore,
Who was not tremulous with love-lore.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was born in Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard graduate, minister, essayist, orator and popular philosopher, he was a crucial figure in the development of American liberal values. He was a founding father of Transcendentalism, the literary movement rooted in English and German Romantic traditions.
These four short poems are from the group of individual verses entitled Quatrains, first included in the collection Mayday and other pieces (1867). They can be read here in their initial sequencing. The suggestion, made on the basis of Emerson’s own comments, is that they respond formally to the Persian genre of epigrams and gnomic verses.
The first, Poet, is particularly four-square and hymn-like, but its command, “to mask a king in weeds” has different possible interpretations. Does it declare the poet’s obligation to speak truth to power, or suggest that the poet must refuse to acknowledge worldly power altogether? And what about “weeds”? It’s an old word for clothes so might suggest a king disguised in a non-ceremonial, simply woven garment, but there’s an inevitable hint, too, of the botanical kind of weed in all its clambering natural vigour.
It’s also interesting to imagine the king as emblematic of the major cultural figures Emerson names in his poem Solution. Solution is a rather long-winded companion poem to another shorter one, The Test, in which the Muse sets us a puzzle: to identify the five creative spirits whose work burns brightest. The answer is: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Swedenborg and Goethe. In Poet, Emerson might be reminding himself that the “craft of genius” lies in resisting the display of such influences, using “simple words” rather than grand, imitative gestures. Or perhaps the matter is more basic and technical: any “fiery thought” in a poem is stronger if it creates the impression of having occurred as naturally as a weed.
The Gardener of the second quatrain is addressed as “true Brahmin”, a priest of Brahma. In Hindu thought, Brahma is the supreme being, manifesting himself throughout the universe. Artists sometimes depict him with four heads – and perhaps the quatrain form itself distantly reflects that cardinal structure.
Emerson, deeply influenced by eastern philosophies, unites the Brahmin, the Gardener and the (ideal) Poet. Because of his particular identification with nature, “hid in vines, peeping through many a loop”, his vision will be sharpened and refined rather than obscured. In the imagery of the vines and the “beurré”, a variety of pear whose ripening causes its branch to “stoop”, there may be an echo of the opening lines of Keats’s Ode to Autumn. And despite the specifically Sanskrit reference Wordsworth, I think, would not have found the “Vedas of the violet” an alien concept.
Heri, Cras, Hodie (Yesterday, Tomorrow, Today), juggling the usual, chronological word order of the Latin list, expands on the ancient eastern theme of mindfulness, (described engagingly here as “not wobbling”). The three chronological units, Past, Future and Present, are skilfully evoked, with a rather effective shift into personification characterising the Present as an outcast, a “poor relation”, almost: “To-day slinks poorly off”. There’s a rhetorical force which works especially well in the vatic tone of the last couplet: “Future or Past, no richer secret folds, / O friendless Present, than thy bosom holds.” This poor relation offers wealth to those who can ignore the ever-attractive “shine” of times past and the tendency to squint, vaguely hopeful, at something that cannot in fact be “seen”.
My selection of Quatrains ends with a return to the Poet as central figure. Casella isn’t himself a poet: he is the composer and singer who appears in the second canto of Dante’s Purgatorio, and who, it seems, has set the poet’s own work to music. I can’t help feeling that Emerson, while a huge admirer of Dante, is making fun to some extent of Casella, or of romantic love itself. The dactylic rhythm isn’t the only feature that suggests a comic undertow. There’s the end-rhyme of the last couplet, with its insistence on a mis-stress (if not a mistress). If you stress the word “OF” instead of “YORE” as the metre demands, the result is one of those double-rhymes that often signals bathos: “OF yore” and “LOVE-lore”. The poem might have trembled more empathically, it’s true, but I warm to that possible flash of good-humoured mockery.
Emerson the writer is remembered today as a major essayist rather than a major poet. His poems are at their best, I think, when their focus is small-scale. The Quatrains are poetic distillations of his key ideas, but have the directness and vitality that prove them more than a by-product.
