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monadnoc.

- Thousand minstrels woke within me,
- ‘Our music's in the hills;’—
- Gayest pictures rose to win me,
- Leopard-colored rills.
- ‘Up!—If thou knew'st who calls
- To twilight parks of beech ard pine,
- High over the river intervals,
- Above the ploughman's highest line,
- Over the owner's farthest walls!
- Up! where the airy citadel
- O'erlooks the surging landscape's swell!
- Let not unto the stones the Day
- Her lily and rose, her sea and land display.
- Read the celestial sign!
- Lo! the south answers to the north;
- Bookworm, break this sloth urbane;
- A greater spirit bids thee forth
- Than the gray dreams which thee detain.
- Mark how the climbing Oreads
- Beckon thee to their arcades;
- Youth, for a moment free as they,
- Teach thy feet to feel the ground,
- Ere yet arrives the wintry day
- When Time thy feet has bound.
- Take the bounty of thy birth,
- Taste the lordship of the earth.’
- I heard, and I obeyed,—
- Assured that he who made the claim,
- Well known, but loving not a name,
- Was not to be gainsaid.
- Ere yet the summoning voice was still,
- I turned to Cheshire's haughty hill.
- From the fixed cone the cloud-rack flowed
- Like ample banner flung abroad
- To all the dwellers in the plains
- Round about, a hundred miles,
- With salutation to the sea and to the bordering isles.
- In his own loom's garment dressed,
- By his proper bounty blessed,
- Fast abides this constant giver,
- Pouring many a cheerful river;
- To far eyes, an aerial isle
- Unploughed, which finer spirits pile
- Which morn and crimson evening paint
- For bard, for lover and for saint;
- An eyemark and the country's core,
- Inspirer, prophet evermore;
- Pillar which God aloft had set
- So that men might it not forget;
- It should be their life's ornament,
- And mix itself with each event;
- Gauge and calendar and dial,
- Weatherglass and chemic phial,
- Garden of berries, perch of birds,
- Pasture of pool-haunting herds,
- Graced by each change of sum untold,
- Earth-baking heat, stone-cleaving cold.
- The Titan heeds his sky-affairs,
- Rich rents and wide alliance shares;
- Mysteries of color daily laid
- By morn and eve in light and shade;
- And sweet varieties of chance,
- And the mystic seasons' dance;
- And thief-like step of liberal hours
- Thawing snow-drift into flowers.
- O, wondrous craft of plant and stone
- By eldest science wrought and shown!
- ‘Happy,’ I said, ‘whose home is here!
- Fair fortunes to the mountaineer!
- Boon Nature to his poorest shed
- Has royal pleasure-grounds outspread.’
- Intent, I searched the region round,
- And in low hut the dweller found:
- Woe is me for my hope's downfall!
- Is yonder squalid peasant all
- That this proud nursery could breed
- For God's vicegerency and stead?
- Time out of mind, this forge of ores;
- Quarry of spars in mountain pores;
- Old cradle, hunting-ground and bier
- Of wolf and otter, bear and deer;
- Well-built abode of many a race;
- Tower of observance searching space;
- Factory of river and of rain;
- Link in the alps' globe-girding chain;
- By million changes skilled to tell
- What in the Eternal standeth well,
- And what obedient Nature can;—
- Is this colossal talisman Kindly to plant and blood and kind,
- But speechless to the master's mind?
- I thought to find the patriots
- In whom the stock of freedom roots;
- To myself I oft recount
- Tales of many a famous mount,—
- Wales, Scotland, Uri, Hungary's dells;
- Bards, Roys, Scanderbegs and Tells;
- And think how Nature in these towers
- Uplifted shall condense her powers,
- And lifting man to the blue deep
- Where stars their perfect courses keep,
- Like wise preceptor, lure his eye
- To sound the science of the sky,
- And carry learning to its height
- Of untried power and sane delight:
- The Indian cheer, the frosty skies,
- Rear purer wits, inventive eyes,—
- Eyes that frame cities where none be,
- And hands that stablish what these see:
- And by the moral of his place
- Hint summits of heroic grace;
- Man in these crags a fastness find
- To fight pollution of the mind;
- In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong,
- Adhere like this foundation strong,
- The insanity of towns to stem
- With simpleness for stratagem.
- But if the brave old mould is broke,
- And end in churls the mountain folk
- In tavern cheer and tavern joke.
- Sink, O mountain, in the swamp!
- Hide in thy skies, O sovereign lamp!
- Perish like leaves, the highland breed
- No sire survive, no son succeed!
- Soft! let not the offended muse
- Toil's hard hap with scorn accuse,
- Many hamlets sought I then,
- Many farms of mountain men.
- Rallying round a parish steeple
- Nestle warm the highland people,
- Coarse and boisterous, yet mild,
- Strong as giant, slow as child.
- Sweat and season are their arts,
- Their talismans are ploughs and carts;
- And well the youngest can command
- Honey from the frozen land;
- With eloverheads the swamp adorn,
- Change the running sand to corn;
- For wolf and fox, bring lowing herds,
- And for cold mosses, cream and curds:
- Weave wood to canisters and mats;
- Drain sweet maple juice in vats.
- No bird is safe that cuts the air
- From their rifle or their snare;
- No fish, in river or in lake,
- But their long hands it thence will take;
- Whilst the country's flinty face,
- Like wax, their fashioning skill betrays,
- To fill the hollows, sink the hills,
- Bridge gulfs, drain swamps, build dams and mills,
- And fit the bleak and howling waste
- For homes of virtue, sense and taste.
- The World-soul knows his own affair,
- Forelooking, when he would prepare
- For the next ages, men of mould
- Well embodied, well ensouled,
- He cools the present's fiery glow,
- Sets the life-pulse strong but slow:
- Bitter winds and fasts anstere
- His quarantines and grottoes, where
- He slowly cures decrepit flesh,
- And brings it infantile and fresh.
- Toil and tempest are the toys
- And games to breathe his stalwart boys:
- They bide their time, and well can prove,
- If need were, their line from Jove;
- Of the same stuff, and so allayed,
- As that whereof the sun is made,
- And of the fibre, quick and strong,
- Whose throbs are love, whose thrills are song.
- Now in sordid weeds they sleep,
- In dulness now their secret keep;
- Yet, will you learn our ancient speech,
- These the masters who can teach.
- Fourscore or a hundred words
- All their vocal muse affords;
- But they turn them in a fashion
- Past clerks' or statesmen's art or passion.
- I can spare the college bell,
- And the learned lecture, well;
- Spare the clergy and libraries,
- Institutes and dictionaries,
- For that hardy English root
- Thrives here, unvalued, underfoot
- Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
- Squandering your unquoted mirth,
- Which keeps the ground and never soars,
- While Jake retorts and Reuben roars;
- Scoff of yeoman strong and stark,
- Goes like bullet to its mark;
- While the solid curse and jeer
- Never balk the waiting ear.
- On the summit as I stood.
- O'er the floor of plain and flood
- Seemed to me, the towering hill
- Was not altogether still,
- But a quiet sense conveyed:
- If I err not, thus it said: —
- ‘Many feet in summer seek,
- Oft, my far-appearing peak;
- In the dreaded winter time,
- None save dappling shadows climb,
- Under clouds, my lonely head,
- Old as the sun, old almost as the shade;
- And comest thou
- To see strange forests and new snow,
- And tread uplifted land?
- And leavest thou thy lowland race,
- Here amid clouds to stand?
- And wouldst be my companion
- Where I gaze, and still shall gaze,
- Through tempering nights and flashing days,
- When forests fall, and man is gone
- Over tribes and over times,
- At the burning Lyre,
- Nearing me,
- With its stars of northern fire,
- In many a thousand years?
- ‘Gentle pilgrim, if thou know
- The gamut old of Pan,
- And how the hills began,
- The frank blessings of the hill
- Fall on thee, as fall they will.
- ‘Let him heed who can and will;
- Enchantment fixed me here
- To stand the hurts of time, until
- In mightier chant I disappear.
- If thou trowest
- How the chemic eddies play,
- Pole to pole, and what they say;
- And that these gray erags
- Not on crags are hung,
- But beads are of a rosary
- On prayer and music strung;
- And, credulous, through the granite seeming,
- Seest the smile of Reason beaming;—
- Can thy style-discerning eye
- The hidden-working Builder spy,
- Who builds, yet makes no chips, no din,
- With hammer soft as snowflake's flight;—
- Knowest thou this?
- O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!
- Already my rocks lie light,
- And soon my cone will spin.
- ‘For the world was built in order,
- And the atoms march in tune;
- Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder,
- The sun obeys them and the moon.
- Orb and atom forth they prance,
- When they hear from far the rune;
- None so backward in the troop,
- When the music and the dance
- Reach his place and circumstance,
- But knows the sun-creating sound,
- And, though a pyramid, will bound.
- ‘Monadnoc is a mountain strong,
- Tall and good my kind among;
- But well I know, no mountain can,
- Zion or Meru, measure with man.
- For it is on zodiacs writ,
- Adamant is soft to wit:
- And when the greater comes again
- With my secret in his brain,
- I shall pass, as glides my shadow
- Daily over hill and meadow.
- ‘Through all time, in light, in gloom
- Well I hear the approaching feet
- On the flinty pathway beat
- Of him that cometh, and shall come;
- Of him who shall as lightly bear
- My daily load of woods and streams,
- As doth this round sky-cleaving boat
- Which never strains its rocky beams;
- Whose timbers, as they silent float,
- Alps and Caucasus uprear,
- And the long Alleghanies here,
- And all town-sprinkled lands that be,
- Sailing through stars with all their history.
- ‘Every morn I lift my head,
- See New England underspread,
- South from Saint Lawrence to the Sound,
- From Katskill east to the sea-bound.
- Anchored fast for many an age,
- I await the bard and sage,
- Who, in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed,
- Shall string Monadnoc like a bead.
- Comes that cheerful troubadour,
- This mound shall throb his face before,
- As when, with inward fires and pain,
- It rose a bubble from the plain.
- When he cometh, I shall shed,
- From this wellspring in my head,
- Fountain-drop of spicier worth
- Than all vintage of the earth.
- There's fruit upon my barren soil
- Costlier far than wine or oil.
- There's a berry blue and gold,—
- Autumn-ripe, its juices hold
- Sparta's stoutness, Bethlehem's heart,
- Asia's rancor, Athens’ art,
- Slowsure Britain's secular might,
- And the German's inward sight.
- I will give my son to eat
- Best of Pan's immortal meat,
- Bread to eat, and juice to drain;
- So the coinage of his brain
- Shall not be forms of stars, but stars,
- Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars.
- He comes, but not of that race bred
- “Who daily climb my specular head.
- Oft as morning wreathes my scarf,
- Fled the last plumule of the Dark,
- Pants up hither the spruce clerk
- From South Cove and City Wharf.
- I take him up my rugged sides,
- Half-repentant, scant of breath,—
- Bead-eyes my granite chaos show,
- And my midsummer snow:
- Open the daunting map beneath,—
- All his county, sea and land,
- Dwarfed to measure of his hand;
- His day's ride is a furlong space,
- His city-tops a glimmering haze.
- I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding;
- “See there the grim gray rounding
- Of the bullet of the earth
- Whereon ye sail,
- Tumbling steep
- In the uncontinented deep.”
- He looks on that, and he turns pale.
- 'T is even so, this treacherous kite,
- Farm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere,
- Thoughtless of its anxious freight,
- Plunges eyeless on forever;
- And he, poor parasite,
- Cooped in a ship he cannot steer,—
- Who is the captain he knows not,
- Port or pilot trows not,—
- Risk or ruin he must share.
- I scowl on him with my cloud.
- With my north wind chill his blood;
- I lame him. clattering down the rocks;
- And to live he is in fear.
- Then, at last, I let him down
- Once more into his dapper town,
- To chatter, frightened, to his clan
- And forget me if he can.'
- As in the old poetic fame
- The gods are blind and lame,
- And the simular despite
- Betrays the more abounding might,
- So call not waste that barren cone
- Above the floral zone,
- Where forests starve:
- It is pure use;—
- What sheaves like those which here we glean and bind
- Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse?
- Ages are thy days,
- Thou grand affirmer of the present tense,
- And type of permanence!
- Firm ensign of the fatal Being,
- Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief,
- That will not bide the seeing!
- Hither we bring
- Our insect miseries to thy rocks;
- And the whole flight, with folded wing,
- Vanish, and end their murmuring,—
- Vanish beside these dedicated blocks,
- Which who can tell what mason laid?
- Spoils of a front none need restore,
- Replacing frieze and architrave;—
- Where flowers each stone rosette and metope brave;
- Still is the haughty pile erect
- Of the old building Intellect.
- Complement of human kind,
- Holding us at vantage still,
- Our sumptuous indigence,
- O barren mound, thy plenties fill!
- We fool and prate;
- Thou art silent and sedate.
- To myriad kinds and times one sense
- The constant mountain doth dispense;
- Shedding on all its snows and leaves,
- One joy it joys, one grief it grieves.
- Thou seest, O watchman tall,
- Our towns and races grow and fall,
- And imagest the stable good
- For which we all our lifetime grope,
- In shifting form the formless mind,
- And though the substance us elude,
- We in thee the shadow find
- Thou, in our astronomy
- An opaker star,
- Seen haply from afar,
- Above the horizon's hoop,
- A moment, by the railway troop,
- As o'er some bolder height they speed,
- By circumspeet ambition,
- By errant gain,
- By feasters and the frivolous,—
- Recallest us,
- And makest sane.
- Mute orator! well skilled to plead,
- And send conviction without phrase,
- Thou dost succor and remede
- The shortness of our days,
- And promise, on thy Founder's truth,
- Long morrow to this mortal youth.

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monadnoc. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 9 (Poems) [1909]

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Part of: The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 12 vols. (Fireside Edition).

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monadnoc.