Emerson's Essays By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson's Essays

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Summary and Analysis of Nature

Chapter 1 - Nature

Concerned initially with how we reflect on solitude, the stars, and the grandeur of nature, this chapter turns from the universal world, symbolized in the stars that Emerson views at night, and focuses on how we perceive objects around us. Emerson speaks of the landscape in which he walks and how he, as a poet, can best integrate all that he sees. What is most important in this sequence is the similar ways we perceive the various objects — stars, the landscape, and the poet.

Emerson's gazing at stars is an example of nightly rediscovering the eternal — making each experience new — and continues the theme of progress from the introduction. Added to this theme is a second one, the theme of accessibility. Using stars as symbols of the universe, Emerson states that we take stars for granted because they are always present in our lives, no matter where we live. However, although they are accessible because we can see them, they are also inaccessible: Their distance from us makes them more elusive than we might imagine.

Emerson then moves from commenting on the faraway stars to discussing the immediate landscape around him. Creating a bond between stars and the landscape, he furthers the theme of a chain linking everything in the universe. Just as stars are accessible to all who will take the time to gaze at them, so too is the everyday landscape around us. Recalling the farms he sees while walking, Emerson encourages us to perceive nature as an integrated whole — and not merely as a collection of individual objects. He distinguishes between knowing who owns various farms and being able to see a unified landscape vista, of which the farms form but a single part.

Claiming that the person who is most likely to see the whole of things is the poet, Emerson differentiates between the poet and other people: The poet, he says, is one of the few people who can see nature plainly, not superficially, as most of us do. In order for us to see nature plainly, we must cast off old ways of seeing. Here, again, the theme of casting off is present: Instead of the theories and the past ("the dry bones") that Emerson said needed to be discarded, the person who yearns to see with new eyes must cast off years like a snake sheds its skin, revealing the child within. A child, Emerson says, accepts nature as it is rather than manipulating it into something it is not, as an adult would do.

Emerson states that when he himself stands in the woods, he feels the Universal Being flowing through him. This notion of the Universal Being, which he identifies with God, is what many readers identify as transcendentalism. Every object in nature, including each human, partakes of this animating life force; through it, all objects in nature are linked. However, Emerson suggests a paradoxical relationship when he writes, "I am nothing. I see all." Finding oneself only by first losing oneself is a recurring — and puzzling — theme in much transcendental thinking. We must read many of Emerson's ideas symbolically rather than literally, and, above all, we should remember the importance of his message and not get sidetracked by the images he uses to communicate his ideas.

Finally, Emerson returns to the key idea in the poetic line of Plotinus: Nature does not have a personality that it alone devises. Humans, he says, who are paramount over nature, grant to it human characteristics we perceive it to have.

Summary and Analysis of Nature

About Nature

 

Emerson's earliest reference to an essay on nature occurs in his journal for 1833. Three years later, in 1836, he anonymously published his now-famous Nature. It was his first major work, and it continues to be his best known. The essay met with good critical reception but with little support from the reading public. He reprinted it in his 1849 edition of Nature; Addresses, and Lectures.

The essay's epigraphs will vary according to which edition of Nature is anthologized. In the 1836 edition, for example, Emerson introduced the essay with a quotation from the Roman philosopher Plotinus, but when he reprinted the essay in 1849, he omitted Plotinus' poetic line and inserted one of his own poems. Some of today's literary anthologies do not include either epigraph; others include both.

The 1836 epigraph from Plotinus reads: "Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know." This poetic line emphasizes a theme that runs throughout the essay: Nature does not have a personality of its own. When we say, for instance, that nature is upset because a storm is violently raging outside, we are projecting a human emotion onto nature that it itself does not possess.

Emerson's six-line poem that he uses as the epigraph for the 1849 edition asserts the interconnectedness of all things:

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

Nature, in the images of a rose and a worm, speaks directly to individuals. Within these six lines, Emerson introduces various themes found in the essay, including the theme of the chain that binds together all of nature. Often referred to as the Great Chain of Being, this concept outlines the theory of evolution — another theme of his — that would shock the world when Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859. Note that the worm in Emerson's poem strives to become a perfect form, a human being.

Unlike many of Emerson's essays, Nature is extremely long and is divided into an introduction and eight chapters, or sections. Readers should number each paragraph in pencil for easy reference throughout these Notes and in the classroom.

Summary and Analysis of Nature

Introduction

Laying out the problem that he will attempt to solve in the essay, Emerson states that our energy and excitement in creating something new has been lost because we try to understand the world around us by using only theories and histories about nature rather than personally observing it. One solution to this problem involves our casting off impersonal theories or descriptions that distance us from nature and ourselves; afterwards, we can reexamine the actual thing that we are a part of — namely, nature. Direct experience with nature is best because it provides better insight into the contemporary world than does the historian's teachings or the scientist's theories.

Emerson's discarding traditional ways of viewing the world indicates the importance that progress will play in the essay. Note that the worm/man relationship in the 1849 epigraphic poem contains verbs — " striving" and "mounts" — that connote the idea of progress. But Emerson also draws attention to the backward steps we too readily think of as progressive. He characterizes these steps as groping "among the dry bones of the past," and he quickly moves from this notion of a stagnant death to one of a revitalized future in which original thoughts reign.

In order to help us focus more clearly on nature, Emerson distinguishes nature from art. Art, he says, is natural objects or materials that we alter for our own purposes — for example, a statue or a picture. That said, however, this distinction is relatively inconsequential to Emerson.

The introduction ends by defining nature as all that is external to ourselves — all that is "not me," including our own bodies.