May-Day

The Project Gutenberg eBook, May-Day, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Title: May-Day
and Other Pieces
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Release Date: May 31, 2005 [eBook #15963]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAY-DAY***
This eBook was prepared from the 1867 George Routledge and Sons edition by Les Bowler.
MAY-DAY AND OTHER PIECES?BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
CONTENTS.
MAY-DAY.
THE ADIRONDACS.
OCCASIONAL AND MISCELLANEOUS PIECES.
BRAHMA
NEMESIS
FATE
FREEDOM
ODE SUNG IN THE TOWN HALL, CONCORD, JULY 4, 1857
BOSTON HYMN
VOLUNTARIES
LOVE AND THOUGHT
LOVER'S PETITION
UNA
LETTERS
RUBIES
MERLIN'S SONG
THE TEST
SOLUTION
NATURE AND LIFE.
NATURE
THE ROMANY GIRL
DAYS
THE CHARTIST'S COMPLAINT
MY GARDEN
THE TITMOUSE
SEA-SHORE
SONG OF NATURE
TWO RIVERS
WALDEINSAMKEIT
TERMINUS
THE PAST
THE LAST FAREWELL
IN MEMORIAM
ELEMENTS.
EXPERIENCE
COMPENSATION
POLITICS
HEROISM
CHARACTER
CULTURE
FRIENDSHIP
BEAUTY
MANNERS
ART
SPIRITUAL LAWS
UNITY
WORSHIP
QUATRAINS.
TRANSLATIONS.
MAY-DAY.
Daughter of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring,?With sudden passion languishing,?Maketh all things softly smile,?Painteth pictures mile on mile,?Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths,?Whence a smokeless incense breathes.?Girls are peeling the sweet willow,?Poplar white, and Gilead-tree,?And troops of boys?Shouting with whoop and hilloa,?And hip, hip three times three.?The air is full of whistlings bland;?What was that I heard?Out of the hazy land??Harp of the wind, or song of bird,?Or clapping of shepherd's hands,?Or vagrant booming of the air,?Voice of a meteor lost in day??Such tidings of the starry sphere?Can this elastic air convey.?Or haply 't was the cannonade?Of the pent and darkened lake,?Cooled by the pendent mountain's shade,?Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break,?Afflicted moan, and latest hold?Even unto May the iceberg cold.?Was it a squirrel's pettish bark,?Or clarionet of jay? or hark,?Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads,?Steering north with raucous cry?Through tracts and provinces of sky,?Every night alighting down?In new landscapes of romance,?Where darkling feed the clamorous clans?By lonely lakes to men unknown.?Come the tumult whence it will,?Voice of sport, or rush of wings,?It is a sound, it is a token?That the marble sleep is broken,?And a change has passed on things.
Beneath the calm, within the light,?A hid unruly appetite?Of swifter life, a surer hope,?Strains every sense to larger scope,?Impatient to anticipate?The halting steps of aged Fate.?Slow grows the palm, too slow the pearl:?When Nature falters, fain would zeal?Grasp the felloes of her wheel,?And grasping give the orbs another whirl.?Turn swiftlier round, O tardy ball!?And sun this frozen side,?Bring hither back the robin's call,?Bring back the tulip's pride.
Why chidest thou the tardy Spring??The hardy bunting does not chide;?The blackbirds make the maples ring?With social cheer and jubilee;?The redwing flutes his o-ka-lee,?The robins know the melting snow;?The sparrow meek, prophetic-eyed,?Her nest beside the snow-drift weaves,?Secure the osier yet will hide?Her callow brood in mantling leaves;?And thou, by science all undone,?Why only must thy reason fail?To see the southing of the sun?
As we thaw frozen flesh with snow,?So Spring will not, foolish fond,?Mix polar night with tropic glow,?Nor cloy us with unshaded sun,?Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance,?But she has the temperance?Of the gods, whereof she is one,--?Masks her treasury of heat?Under east-winds crossed with sleet.?Plants and birds and humble creatures?Well accept her rule austere;?Titan-born, to hardy natures?Cold is genial and dear.?As Southern wrath to Northern right?Is but straw to anthracite;?As in the day of sacrifice,?When heroes piled the pyre,?The dismal Massachusetts ice?Burned more than others' fire,?So Spring guards with surface cold?The garnered heat of ages old:?Hers to sow the seed of bread,?That man and all the kinds be fed;?And, when the sunlight fills the hours,?Dissolves the crust, displays the flowers.
The world rolls round,--mistrust it not,--?Befalls again what once befell;?All things return, both sphere and mote,?And I shall hear my bluebird's note,?And dream the dream of Auburn dell.
When late I walked, in earlier days,?All was stiff and stark;?Knee-deep snows choked all the ways,?In the sky no spark;?Firm-braced I sought my ancient woods,?Struggling through the drifted roads;?The whited desert knew me not,?Snow-ridges masked each darling spot;?The summer dells, by genius haunted,?One arctic moon had disenchanted.?All the sweet secrets therein hid?By Fancy, ghastly spells undid.?Eldest mason, Frost, had piled,?With wicked ingenuity,?Swift cathedrals in the wild;?The piny hosts were sheeted ghosts?In the star-lit minster aisled.?I found no joy: the icy wind?Might rule the forest to his mind.?Who would freeze in frozen brakes??Back to books and sheltered home,?And wood-fire flickering on the walls,?To hear, when, 'mid our talk and games,?Without the baffled north-wind calls.?But soft! a sultry morning breaks;?The cowslips make the brown brook gay;?A happier hour, a longer day.?Now the sun leads in the May,?Now desire of action wakes,?And the wish to roam.
The caged linnet in the Spring?Hearkens for the choral glee,?When his fellows on the wing?Migrate from the Southern Sea;?When trellised grapes their flowers unmask,?And the new-born tendrils twine,?The old wine darkling in the cask?Feels the bloom on the living vine,?And bursts the hoops at hint of Spring:?And so, perchance, in Adam's race,?Of Eden's bower some dream-like trace?Survived the Flight, and swam the Flood,?And