Poems / Ralph Waldo Emerson [electronic text]

NATURE

I

WINTERS know Easily to shed the snow, And the untaught Spring is wise In cowslips and anemonies. Nature, hating art and pains, Baulks and baffles plotting brains; Casualty and Surprise Are the apples of her eyes; But she dearly loves the poor, And, by marvel of her own, Strikes the loud pretender down. For Nature listens in the rose And hearkens in the berry's bell To help her friends, to plague her foes, And like wise God she judges well. Yet doth much her love excel To the souls that never fell, To swains that live in happiness And do well because they please, Who walk in ways that are unfamed, And feats achieve before they're named.

II * 1.1

SHE is gamesome and good, But of mutable mood,— No dreary repeater now and again, She will be all things to all men. She who is old, but nowise feeble, Pours her power into the people, Merry and manifold without bar, Makes and moulds them what they are, And what they call their city way Is not their way, but hers, And what they say they made to-day, They learned of the oaks and firs. She spawneth men as mallows fresh, Hero and maiden, flesh of her flesh; She drugs her water and her wheat With the flavors she finds meet, And gives them what to drink and eat; And having thus their bread and growth, They do her bidding, nothing loath. What's most theirs is not their own, But borrowed in atoms from iron and stone, And in their vaunted works of Art The master-stroke is still her part. * 1.2

Notes

• * 1.1

  NATURE. II. Page 226. In one of the earlier verse-books the lines called "The Walk," printed in the Appendix, served for the second division of the poem, and there was a third, which Mr. Emerson took for the motto to "Fate," in Conduct of Life, beginning,—

  Delicate omens traced in airTo the lone bard true witness bare.
• * 1.2

  Page 226, note 1. The thought here expressed is found in the essay "Art," in Society and Solitude.