May-Day

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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