Transcendentalism: a Poem in Twelve Books

Stop playing, poet! May a brother speak? / 'Tis you speak, that's your error. Song's our art: / Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts / Instead of draping them in sights and sounds. / -- True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up! / But why such long prolusion and display, / Such turning and adjustment of the harp, / And taking it upon your breast, at length, / Only to speak dry words across its strings? / Stark-naked thought is in request enough: / Speak prose and hollo it till Europe hears! / The six-foot Swiss tube, braced about with bark, / Which helps the hunter's voice from Alp to Alp -- / Exchange our harp for that, -- who hinders you?

But here's your fault; grown men want thought, you think; / Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse: / Boys seek for images and melody, / Men must have reason -- so, you aim at men. / Quite otherwise! Objects throng our youth, 'tis true; / We see and hear and do not wonder much: / If you could tell us what they mean, indeed! / As German Boehme never cared for plants / Until it happed, a-walking in the fields, / He noticed all at once that plants could speak, / Nay, turned with loosened tongue, to talk with him. / That day the daisy had an eye indeed -- / Colloquized with the cowslip on such themes! / We find them extant yet in Jacob's prose. / But by the time youth slips a stage or two / While reading prose in that tough book he wrote / (Collating and emendating the same / And settling on the sense most to our mind), / We shut the clasps and find life's summer past. / Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss -- / Another Boehme with a tougher book / And subtler meanings of what roses say, -- / Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt, / John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about? / He with a "look you! " vents a brace of rhymes, / And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, / Over us, under, round us every side. / Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs / And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all, -- / Buries us with a glory, young once more, / Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.