Trancendentalist Passes: Emerson

[Atlas]

Emerson had a beautiful mind that failed him in his closing years. I always find these stories reach something deep in me. How time can find the thing one holds most dear and take it from you, right before your very eyes.

Emerson himself was more philosophic: "Strange that the kind Heavens should keep us on earth after they have destroyed our connection with things."

I post this only for it's timliness. This article begins...
<blockquote> On this day in 1882 Ralph Waldo Emerson died, at the age of seventy-eight. </blockquote>


These are the thoughts expressed by one Bob Blair on the following poem...


This poem is one of several in which Emerson puts forth the Transcendental notion that all life is connected as the expression of the Divine Soul.

Some think that the most striking lines of this poem, "if eyes were made for seeing,/Then beauty is its own excuse for being" express a separate idea, but Emerson is not that careless. If the seer and the seen are but different aspects of the same thing, then there is no reason to ask why the former perceives a particular characteristic of the latter. The question doesn't mean anything, or at best can only be answered "because it does".


The Rhodora
On being asked, whence is the flower.

<blockquote>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. </blockquote>

Ralph Waldo Emerson