HAMATREYA

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint, Possessed the land which rendered to their toil
Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood. Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm, Saying, “’Tis mine, my children’s and my name’s. How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees! How graceful climb those shadows on my hill!
I fancy these pure waters and the flags Know me, as does my dog: we sympathize; And, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil.”
Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds: And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough. Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave.
They added ridge to valley, brook to pond,
And sighed for all that bounded their domain;
“This suits me for a pasture; that’s my park;
We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge,
And misty lowland, where to go for peat.
The land is well,—lies fairly to the south.
’Tis good, when you have crossed the sea and back, To find the sitfast acres where you left them.”
Ah! the hot owner sees not Death, who adds Him to his land, a lump of mould the more. Hear what the Earth say:—
EARTH-SONG
“Mine and yours; Mine, not yours. Earth endures; Stars abide—

Shine down in the old sea; Old are the shores;
But where are old men?
I who have seen much, Such have I never seen.
“The lawyer’s deed
Ran sure,
In tail,
To them and to their heirs Who shall succeed, Without fail,
Forevermore.
“Here is the land,
Shaggy with wood,
With its old valley, Mound and flood.
But the heritors?—
Fled like the flood’s foam. The lawyer and the laws, And the kingdom,
Clean swept herefrom.
“They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone, How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me, But I hold them?”
When I heard the Earth-song
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave. 

Emerson uses a combination of unrhymed iambic pentameter, short lines, and iambic heptameter. Whatever or which “devises” he uses to construct the poem, I think is unimportant. What is amazing in this poem is that we hear a voice that is such a contrast to the sermonizing, often conflated, convoluted, impossible to read tones of most of his essays. I was “forced” to read Nature a few days ago; handed this poem without an identified author, I would never have guessed Emerson! Never. 

This poem is a little miracle. Where did this poem come from? After a night of reading a Hindu text, did he wake up and this just pour out of him? Did a conversation with Henry David have some influence? Several years would pass before Whitman would send Emerson a copy of Leaves of Grass. Unlike the stilted vocabulary and circular sentences that seem to me to be the essence of Emerson, this poem has crystal clarity. I’m almost certain that Whitman and Sandburg read Hamatreya at some point in their careers. I can identify two dozen of their poems that are influence by both the form and the message.  I’ve always avoided Emerson when possible, never admired his prose. Thoreau, who I hold as the Greatest American Writer, overshadows him completely in breath and depth of thought.

Much Ado About Nothing

Seventeen years ago I was a middle school English teacher in what would now be called a high-poverty, high-risk-of-failure school district in Ohio. This was before American teachers had Curriculum Standards, and High Stakes Testing data to tell them that their students were being “Left Behind.” Somehow, without any testing data, I figured out that my fourteen-year-old students weren’t getting enough to eat, talked and wrote about a lot of crime and violence in their daily lives and needed an education of the highest quality to move on in life.

The school’s reading textbooks were expensive and lavashly colorful. They were also very large and very heavy, difficult to carry and filled with dull, boring stories that no one would ever choose to read, even if stranded on a desert island. They apparently were designed by a committee in Texas whose goal was to instill a deep hatred for literature and the English language in the young.

And so I locked the textbooks up in a cabinet and started teaching with the goal of reaching Shakespeare. I partnered with another English teacher, bought a lot of supplemental materials and books and spent late nights at the copying machine.

What do you need to know to really enjoy Shakespeare’s language? The answer is a a lot of stuff. We started with Ovid and Mythology. Then we moved on to the Romans and the Latin language. The kids loved the Cambridge Latin Course http://amzn.to/1z2WZAT. We did all of Unit One occasionally wearing togas. Latin built their confidence in being able to translate unfamiliar sentence structure. Next, we immersed the students in Medieval and Renaissance history and daily life. We cooked a Medieval Feast using recipes from The Medieval Baker’s Daughter by Madeleine Pelner Cosman http://amzn.to/1BkYKf4.

We started exploring Shakespeare with Baz Luhrmann’s film of Romeo and Juliet. The kids loved the violence, thought the ending was stupid, and maybe didn’t mind memorizing the Palmer’s Sonnet as much as they said they did.

And then I made a major mistake. I scheduled a field trip to the local Renaissance festival for our 120 students. An hour after we arrived I noticed that most of our girls were walking around with roses. Romeo and Juliet had inspired one of our shortest thirteen year old boys to steal $234 of flowers from the shop at the festival. As I was explaining to the flower stand owner that I hadn’t brought my checkbook, my partner teacher arrived with two of our girls and a fully costumed Shakespeare holding a handkerchief to his bleeding nose. The two girls had started a loud name-calling fist fight with each other during his performance. He had bravely left the stage to attempt to break them apart, receiving a sound punch in the nose for his efforts.Total immersion in the period was working a little too well that day!

Not in the least discouraged, we moved on to Branagh’s Much Ado and found that this sunny adaptation had depths that touched my young student’s lives. Hateful siblings, fathers whose tempers quickly turned to abuse and violence, shyness and uncertain feelings about who to love and who is loved, these were emotions my students understood far better than the idealized romance of Romeo and Juliet. They liked the play, demanded to see it again immediately. Bantered Beatrice and Benedick’s lines to each other. Dogberryed at me endlessly and talked on and on about its characters, injustice, deceit. It was without a doubt one of the happiest times of my life. I had, at least for those kids, saved the English language and its greatest writer from that Texas textbook committee.