All Poems
/ page 2970 of 3210 /Ode To William H. Channing
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though loth to grieve
The evil time's sole patriot,
I cannot leave
My buried thought
For the priest's cant,
Or statesman's rant.
To Eva
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
O Fair and stately maid, whose eye
Was kindled in the upper sky
At the same torch that lighted mine;
For so I must interpret still
Thy sweet dominion o'er my will,
A sympathy divine.
Painting And Sculpture
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sinful painter drapes his goddess warm,
Because she still is naked, being drest;
The godlike sculptor will not so deform
Beauty, which bones and flesh enough invest.
Saadi
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trees in groves,
Kine in droves,
In ocean sport the scaly herds,
Wedge-like cleave the air the birds,
Tact
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
The maiden in danger
Was saved by the swain,
His stout arm restored her
To Broadway again:
Astræ
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Himself it was who wrote
His rank, and quartered his own coat.
There is no king nor sovereign state
That can fix a hero's rate;
Suum Cuique
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
The rain has spoiled the farmer's day;
Shall sorrow put my books away?
Thereby are two days lost:
Nature shall mind her own affairs,
I will attend my proper cares,
In rain, or sun, or frost.
The Barberry Bush
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
The bush that has most briers and bitter fruit,
Wait till the frost has turned its green leaves red,
Its sweetened berries will thy palate suit,
And thou may'st find e'en there a homely bread.
Sursum Corda
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Seek not the Spirit, if it hide,
Inexorable to thy zeal:
Baby, do not whine and chide;
Art thou not also real?
Hamatreya
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I heard the Earth-song,
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave.
Alphonso Of Castile
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
I Alphonso live and learn,
Seeing nature go astern.
Things deteriorate in kind,
Lemons run to leaves and rind,
Uriel
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
IT fell in the ancient periods
Which the brooding soul surveys,
Or ever the wild Time coin'd itself
Into calendar months and days.
The Sphinx
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Through a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame
"Who telleth one of my meanings
Is master of all I am."
Forbearance
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun;
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk;
At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse;
Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust;
Berrying
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
"May be true what I had heard,
Earth's a howling wilderness
Truculent with fraud and force,"
Said I, strolling through the pastures,
Dirge
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Knows he who tills this lonely field
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?
The Rhodora
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Compensation
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should I keep holiday,
When other men have none?
Why but because when these are gay,
I sit and mourn alone.
Blight
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give me truths,
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition. If I knew
Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
Bacchus
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bring me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape,
Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through
Under the Andes to the Cape,
Suffer no savor of the earth to scape.