Romanticism

It is to Emerson I have turned now,

damp February, for he has written

of the moral harmony of nature.

The key to every man is his thought.

But Emerson, half angel, suffers his

dear Ellen’s dying only half-consoled

that her lungs shall no more be torn nor her

head scalded by her blood, nor her whole life

suffer from the warfare between the force

& delicacy of her soul & the

weakness of her frame . . . March the 29th,

1832, of an evening strange

with dreaming, he scribbles, I visited

Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.

—Emerson looking in, clutching his key.

Months of hard freeze have ruptured the wild

fields of Ohio, and burdock is standing

as if stunned by persistent cold wind

or leaning over, as from rough breath.

I have brought my little one, bundled and

gloved, to the lonely place to let her run,

hoary whiskers, wild fescue, cracks widened

along the ground hard from a winter drought.

I have come out for the first time in weeks

still full of fever, insomnia-fogged,

to track her flags of breath where she’s dying

to vanish on the hillsides of bramble

and burr. The seasonal birds—scruff cardinal,

one or two sparrows, something with yellow—

scatter in small explosions of ice.

Emerson, gentle mourner, would be pleased

by the physical crunch of the ground, damp

from the melt, shaped by the shape of his boot,

that half of him who loved the Dunscore heath

too rocky to cultivate, covered thick

with heather, gnarled hawthorn, the yellow furze

not far from Carlyle’s homestead where they strolled,

—that half of him for whom nature was thought.

Kate has found things to deepen her horror

for evenings to come, a deer carcass tunneled

by slugs, drilled, and abandoned, a bundle

of bone shards, hoof and hide, hidden by thick

bramble, or the bramble itself enough

to collapse her dreams, braided like rope, blood-

colored, blood-barbed, tangled as Medusa.

What does she see when she looks at such things?

I do not know what is so wrong with me

that my body has erupted, system

by system, sick unto itself. I do

not know what I have done, nor what she thinks

when she turns toward her ill father. How did

Emerson behold of his Ellen, un-

embalmed face fallen in, of her white hands?

Dreams & beasts are two keys by which we are

to find out the secrets of our own natures.

Half angel, Emerson wrestles all night

with his journal, the awful natural

fact of Ellen’s death, which must have been

deeper sacrifice than a sacrament.

Where has she gone now, whose laughter comes down

like light snow on the beautiful hills?

Perhaps it is the world that is the matter . . .

—His other half worried by the wording.

Notes:

Emerson’s account of his first wife Ellen’s illness is taken from a letter on the day of her death, February 9, 1832, to his Aunt Mary. His brother Charles wrote, in a letter to another brother, William, that Waldo was “as one over whom the waters have gone.” On March 29, Emerson entered this solitary sentence in his journal: “I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.” The comments about dreams, beasts, and keys are also from his journals.

Source: Changeable Thunder (University of Arkansas Press, 2001)