Nature

“The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”

In a series of metaphors about the natural world, such as the sun shining today just as in classical or biblical times, Emerson conveys that there is still spiritual enlightenment to be garnered from the present time. The idea of wool and flax ripe for collection communicates a sense of urgency, as though there is a precious commodity out there that should not be allowed to go to waste. Emerson then uses the imperative form to invite his contemporaries to demand a philosophical and spiritual tradition that reflects the current time and place.

“The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.” 

Here, Emerson argues that while the petty chartered farms belong to individual men, the jewel of nature, which is the landscape or horizon, belongs to no one who is concerned with commodities, but to the poet, who can appreciate the wholeness of the scene. Here, as in other parts of his essay, Emerson suggests that the poet is a seminal influence on man’s ability to have an enlightened relationship with nature.

“Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” 

The image of the transparent eyeball stands as a metaphor for the subject’s complete receptivity to God. As the “mean egotism” that defines man as a limited individual dissipates, he opens himself up to divine infinity.