18
TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)READING 27.
Q What aspects of Hindu religion does Emerson’s
poem suggest? How do they compare with
typical Western religious beliefs?READING 30.
18 CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature18 Book5
space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a
transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the
currents of the Universal Being circulate through
me; I am part or parcel of God.
Although best known for his essays, especially those on the
virtues of self-reliance and nonconformity, Emerson was a
poet of considerable talent. He shared with Coleridge and
Wordsworth (both of whom he had met in England) a mys-
tic reverence for nature; but he also brought to his poetry a
unique appreciation of Asian philosophy, which he had
acquired by reading some of the central works of Hindu lit-
erature, including the Bhagavad-Gita(see chapter 3). In
Emerson’s short poem “Brahma,” the voice of the Absolute
Spirit and World Creator reminds the reader that a single
identity—Brahma him/her/itself—underlies all apparent dif-
ferences in nature. All universal forces, explains Brahma—
even death and birth (“shadow and sunlight”)—are one,
the knowledge of which supersedes Heaven.Emerson’s “Brahma” (1856)
If the red slayer^1 think he slays, 1
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near; 5
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings; 10
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin^2 sings.
The strong gods^3 pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;^4
But thou, meek lover of the good! 15
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
set into practice many of the antimaterialist ideals of the
transcendentalists. In his youth, Thoreau earned a bache-
lor’s degree at Harvard University and made his way in the
world by tutoring, surveying, and making pencils. An avid
opponent of slavery, he was jailed briefly for refusing to pay
a poll tax to a pro-slavery government. In an influentialessay on civil disobedience, Thoreau defended the philos-
ophy of passive resistance and moral idealism that he him-
self practiced—a philosophy embraced by the
twentieth-century leaders Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
and Martin Luther King.
In 1845 Thoreau abandoned urban society to live in the
Massachusetts woods near Walden Pond—an experiment
that lasted twenty-six months. He described his love of the
natural world, his nonconformist attitude toward society,
and his deep commitment to monkish simplicity in his
“handbook for living,” called Walden, or Life in the Woods.
In this intimate yet forthright diary, Thoreau glorifies nature
as innocent and beneficent—a source of joy and practical
instruction.From Thoreau’s Walden (1854)
Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went 1
down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I
intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall,
arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber.... It was a
pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods,
through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field
in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The
ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some
open spaces, and it was all dark-colored and saturated with
water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days 10
that I worked there; but for the most part when I came out on
to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand-heap
stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails
shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and
other birds already come to commence another year with us.
They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s
discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that
had lain torpid began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe
had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving
it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond- 20
hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into
the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without
inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a
quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come
out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason
men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if
they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing
them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more
ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes on frosty
mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb 30
and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st
of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of
the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping
about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of
the fog....
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to
front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn
what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that
I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is
so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was 40
quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the
marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to(^1) Shiva, the Hindu god who represents the destructive (and also the
recreative) force in nature; with Brahma and Vishnu, one of the three
central deities in the Hindu pantheon.
(^2) Hindu priest.
(^3) Devas or angelic beings.
(^4) The seven highest Hindu saints.
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