The Snow-Storm by Ralph Waldo Emerson
This week's poem, "The
Snow-Storm" by the American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
aspires not only to rugged grandeur but to irony. Emerson knew the English
Romantic poets, and I think quite possibly "The Snow-Storm" is a
response to Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight". "Tumultuous privacy
of storm"
and "the frolic architecture of the snow" carry an
almost parodic echo of Coleridge's "secret ministry of
frost."
Emerson's poem, for all the
sturdy authority of its blank verse, relishes the snow-storm's gothic abandon,
its subversive, "savage" disregard for "number or
proportion". Nineteenth-century American poets were determined to create a
body of literature distinct from that of Europe, and there's a suggestion that
the primitive snow-storm could invent shapes at least as interesting as the
"slow structures" of deliberate artistry. Conversely, the human
architect might, in terms of geological time, amount to no more than a
snow-flurry.
The first stanza is stately,
smooth-flowing and picturesque, the faintly Biblical touches reminding us that,
before rebelling against organised religion, Emerson had been a minister. The
snow has an apocalyptic quality in that it blurs the usual life-or-death
distinctions. Movement is halted. Boundaries are blotted out – even the boundary
between earth and heaven. The scene then shifts to a friendlier indoors, where
that unexpected word "radiance" emphasises the vivid contrast with
the lightless landscape. Again, a scriptural note is struck, and the
old-fashioned fire, or glowing stove, seems to burn with an almost sacred
incandescence.
And then, it's as if, in the
white space between stanzas, the speaker had ventured outside. The shortened
opening line of the second stanza increases the dramatic effect, the immediacy,
of the summons, "Come see …" And the subsequent description convinces
us there is something worth seeing.
The "fierce
artificer", the snow-storm, has carried out an entire building-project,
from the quarrying of the tiles to the decorative marble drapes of the
"Parian wreaths". It's only when he comes to the end of this extended
conceit that Emerson seems to struggle. "Retiring" must be the
subject of "leaves" but it's hardly obvious. The qualification,
"as he were not", is confusing, to say the least. Clearly, the poet
is still talking about the snow-storm. Perhaps he wants to convey that winter
is far from over, and the snow's retirement merely apparent, and temporary.
But I still like the poem, and
have no objection to a little puzzlement. Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance
is partially carried over into his poetic technique. His diction here is mainly
down-to-earth, with a dash of medieval ("steed", "maugre").
The syntax, like his treatment of conventional forms and meters, dimly aspires
to a more organic shape, although he stops short of real innovation. He
recognised it when he saw it, though, and when Walt Whitman sent him a copy of
Leaves of Grass in 1855, Emerson wrote back an exalted fan-letter: "I give
you joy of your free and brave thought …"
Emerson and Thoreau, though
important thinkers and writers, were not great poets, but it's a pity that
their work is not better known in Britain. They have as much claim as the
Romantics to be the ancestors of today's eco-poets and nature writers. The
current obsession with rivers, rain and water among British poets, for
instance, surely has a source in Emersonian
metaphor.
And it's not only the poets who
echo the Transcendentalists. For many people, the natural world has become the
focus of morality. We sense our obligation to nature also in terms of an
obligation to ourselves to become more "natural". Emerson was
prophetic when he said, "Civilised man has invented the coach, but lost
the use of his feet" and, less cheerily, "The end of the human race
will be that it will eventually die of civilisation."
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