Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, NATURE (2), by RALPH WALDO EMERSON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

NATURE (2), by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: The patient pan
Last Line: High as fly falcons, fancy builds
Subject(s): Nature


The patient Pan,
Drunken with nectar
Sleeps or feigns slumber
Drowsily humming
Music to the march of Time.
This poor tooting creaking cricket,
Pan half asleep, rolling over
His great body in the grass,
Tooting, creaking,
Feigns to sleep, sleeping never:
Tis his manner,
Well he knows his own affair,
Piling mountain-chains of phlegm
On the nervous brain of man,
As he holds down central fires
Under Alps & Andes cold.
Haply else we could not live
Life would be too wild an ode
Sun & planet would explode
Ah! the poor Adamkind
Fault of supplies
From the fire fountains
We busybodies
Ever experiment
See what will come of it
Prove the quaint substances
Prove our bodies, prove our essence
Fortunes, genius, elements,
Try a foot, try a hand,
Then plunge the body in
Then our wits characters
And our gods if we can
Analysing analysing
As the chemist his new stone
Puts to azote, puts to chlorine,
Puts to vegetable blues.
Ah my poor apothecaries,
Can ye never wiselier sit,
Meddle less & more accept,
With dignity not overstepped
Skies have their etiquette

We are faithful to time
Time measured in moments
Only so many
Share of Methusalem
Share of the babe
Hundredhanded, hundredeyed,
Fussy & anxious
We would so gladly
Serve an apprenticeship
Day by day faithfully
Learn the use of Adam's tools
Fire & water, azote, carbon,
Gravity levity
Hatred attraction
Animals chemistry
Botany land
Have a right to our flesh
Know the honest earth by heart

Do the feat of Archimedes
If the earth reject her sons
Till theyve learned her alphabeta
None but Hooke & Newton dare
Cross the threshold when it thunders.
Life is all too short for farming
All too short for architecture
All too short to learn the tongues
And for philosophy
Life's done ere weve begun to think.
Solid farming haw & geeing
Drive uphill the loaded team
Bud the pear & dig potatoes
What time Lyra's in the Zenith
That is wholesome as it makes
Man as massive as the glebe
Pricks dropsical pretension
Tames the infinite romance
Underpins the falcon turrets
High as fly falcons, fancy builds





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