My copy of the Modern Library edition of selected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson is inscribed “John Breithaupt December 29, 1964”, in the immature handwriting that within a year or two would change into the adult scrawl that it is today.
I read a half dozen of these essays over and over again; in “Self Reliance”, a favorite of mine, I had carefully underlined the sentence “To be great is to be misunderstood,” the slogan emblazoned on the banner behind which adolescence marches.
But I read hardly any of the poetry. Emerson was by reputation only an amateur poet with a defective ear. He tried to write like Longfellow, our greatest master of traditional English prosody (along with Robert Frost, a much greater poet) and failed. So it was said.
The little that I had read of his poetry seemed to back up this reputation.
But then there was “The Concord Hymn: Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837”:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept;
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
This poem may be no more than very good occasional poetry, but it does show that Emerson was perfectly capable of writing poetry that was conventional in form.
And there is also “The Rhodora”, a good poem that suffers from having been pickled in anthological brine (to borrow a phrase from E. A. Robinson):
The Rhodora: On Being Asked ‘Whence Is The Flower?’
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
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.
Emerson’s best poems in conventional meter seem to me to be “Brahma”, “The Snowstorm”, and especially “Days”:
Days
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, or sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.
This poem seems to me to be an expression of Emerson’s residual Puritanism, but instead of believing, as the Puritans did, that the important thing in life is to be unremitting in our application to the tasks that life has set us to, lest we find ourselves in occasions of sin, the important thing in life is to to live. This was one of Emerson’s most deeply held convictions, and one that was shared by his friend/disciple/son Henry David Thoreau. In Walden, Thoreau wrote:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Emerson’s best poem, in my opinion, and the one of his poems that has the best title to greatness, is “Threnody”, a profoundly felt lament for his first-born son Waldo, who died of scarlet fever in 1842. The poem is too long to quote and too good to carve up into samples. It is a poem that I read and reread and find always more moving and impressive.
But what of the bulk of Emerson’s poetry, which often departs from regularity in form and meter? I am still trying to get a clear sense of what he was up to; my best guess is that he was not stumbling, but exploring the possibilities of form for expressing the thoughts and emotions that, because they were his, were also everyone’s, and yet could not be expressed in conventional form.
I’ll keep reading.
Books Matter 
Good to see you back in action!
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I’d not read Emerson’s verse before, just his essays, so thanks for the recommendation. I’ve now read “Threnody”, and I thought it was very good, even though he resolves to land at godhood, which I cannot. As you say, the poem is better considered as a whole, but nevertheless there are within certain octets, for example, that are as strikingly powerful as anything I’ve read about what the death of a loved one actually feels to us, does to us. Interesting, too, how Emerson in this doesn’t always keep precise meter. He also alternates to the “AABB” rhyme scheme from the “ABAB” when the emotions come faster.
As an aside (I hope you don’t mind), I’ve never understood the attraction to free verse — if you can’t say something metrically, then why not just say it in prose? In my opinion free verse is an oxymoron. It’s not poetry. There’s something deeply satisfying to us humans in metrical expression, whether musical or literary or both, because such appreciation is quite literally part of the human cortex. That’s as good as any other reason why, for example, I’m still a sucker for the works of the English Romantic poets of the early 19th century. In trying to get at the universal, the basis of what it is to be human, by choosing the exactly right words and meter that conjure up both the image in the mind’s eye and the ethereal feeling that prose itself can’t get to — well, that’s a kind of sorcery that only a few of us have ever been able to expertly practice.
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Whitman wrote the only free verse that I like — “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” and a few other parts of “Leaves” — and maybe a few things by other poets, but that’s about it.
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