Quatrains

A. H.
HIGH was her heart, and yet was well inclined,
Her manners made of bounty well refined;
Far capitals and marble courts, her eye still seemed to see,
Minstrels and kings and high-born dames, and of the best that be.


HUSH!
EVERY thought is public,
Every nook is wide;
Thy gossips spread each whisper,
And the gods from side to side.


ORATOR
HE who has no hands
Perforce must use his tongue;
Foxes are so cunning
Because they are not strong.


ARTIST
QUIT the hut, frequent the palace,
Reck not what the people say;
For still, where’er the trees grow biggest,
Huntsmen find the easiest way.


POET
EVER the Poet from the land
Steers his bark and trims his sail;
Right out to sea his courses stand,
New worlds to find in pinnace frail.


POET
To clothe the fiery thought
In simple words succeeds,
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds.


BOTANIST
Go thou to thy learned task,
I stay with the flowers of Spring:
Do thou of the Ages ask
What me the Hours will bring.


GARDENER
TRUE Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet,
Expound the Vedas of the violet,
Or, hid in vines, peeping through many a loop,
See the plum redden, and the beurré stoop.


FORESTER
HE took the color of his vest
From rabbit’s coat or grouse’s breast;
For, as the wood-kinds lurk and hide,
So walks the woodman, unespied.


NORTHMAN
THE GALE that wrecked you on the sand,
It helped my rowers to row;
The storm is my best galley hand
And drives me where I go.


FROM ALCUIN
THE SEA is the road of the bold,
Frontier of the wheat-sown plains,
The pit wherein the streams are rolled
And fountain of the rains.


EXCELSIOR
OVER his head were the maple buds,
And over the tree was the moon,
And over the moon were the starry studs
That drop from the angels’ shoon.


S. H.
WITH beams December planets dart
His cold eye truth and conduct scanned,
July was in his sunny heart,
October in his liberal hand.


BORROWING FROM THE FRENCH
SOME of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!
Quatrains

by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1904
