LIT – EXTRA CREDITOne of the extraordinary qualities of William Cullen Bryant’s celebrated poem “To a Waterfowl,” is the biographical background out of which the subject and theme of the poem emerged. Bryant, merely in his early twenties, was suffering inwardly and feeling doubtful about his future, and, while walking one evening, realized the experience which would later become the poem.

“The sun had already set, leaving behind it one of those brilliant seas of chrysolite and opal which often flood the New England skies, and, while pausing to contemplate the rosy splendor, with rapt admiration, a solitary bird made its winged way along the illuminated horizon.” Bryant stared at the lone bird “until it was lost in the distance. He then went on with new strength and courage. When he reached the house where he was to stop for the night he immediately sat down and wrote the lines “To a Waterfowl,” the concluding verse of which will perpetuate to future ages the lesson in faith which the scene had impressed upon him. (Bigelow, 1890, p.

We Will Write a Custom Essay Specifically
For You For Only $13.90/page!


order now

42)The essential fruit of the experience is spiritual and issues from nature, which is a hallmark of Romanticism. The lines, “There is a Power whose care/Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,–/The desert and illimitable air,–/Lone wandering, but not lost” signal that nature is not random, but composed and also, contains within it a sort of code, which is perceived both through human senses and through the intimacy of poetic revelation, or expression. In other words, the fact of seeing a lone bird at flight in the twilight sky is identified by the poet as a correspondence with his own inwardly disheveled state of emotion. The moment becomes revelatory. And through the individual experience, Bryant reaches for universal articulation, seeing that the patterns in nature extend and correspond with the subjective viewer, he justly concludes that his experience may be translated through poetry to universal expression.His words “might have been written by any poet of any nationality or of any century.

We are advised to go to Nature for counsel; she comforts us with the thought of her eternal calm, in contrast to the transitory and feverish existence of man”(Phelps, 1924, p. 16). Looking into nature, then, for a Romantic poet, was tantamount to looking into the nature of oneself, and also, into the nature of the Creator. Bryant, a devout Christian, makes it clear that the identification with nature is also an identification with its creator, thus the essential calming, reconciling aspect of the poem. “ He, who, from zone to zone,/ Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight/In the long way that I must tread alone/Will lead my steps aright.”In this way, Bryant demonstrates a triangulation of creative energy comprised of: human perception, nature, and the Almighty Creator, which is represented by the poem’s impetus, theme, and articulation. Typically “visionary,” as a Romantic poet, Bryant fuses inspiration and composition in an anticipation of “meta-poetry” of later generations.

Similarly, the Transcendentalist poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous poem, “The Snowstorm” is often interpreted as a “dramatization of the creative power of nature, suggesting that human art is inferior to nature’s art. The various architecture images in the poem support this interpretation, as the storm appears to be constructing or creating a great work of art in one evening” (Urschel, 1991, p. 15). His contemplation of the dual artistry of man and nature partakes of the same Romantic preoccupations as Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl,” meaning: that each of the poets looks to nature as a revelation, as a directed revelation, which is however perceptible only to those who know how to see and hear it. “The snowstorm in the poem isolates the inhabitants of the house in the same way that Emerson believes God isolates us between curtains of pure sky. The situation for those in the house is complicated by the fact that the snow is not clear, but at first, blinding” (Urschel, 1991, p. 15).Emerson views the revelation of nature as occupying a dissimilar rationality from that of human reason.

So, thre is a tension in his poem, unlike Bryant’s, which immediately engages the universal: all of humanity is somehow disassociated from the over-riding “conversation” of the snowstorm: it stops and disrupts their lives, but they are unable to read its message: “astonished Art/To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,/Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,/The frolic architecture of the snow.”The “astonished Art” implies that nature’s epiphany is not expected as the “mad wind’s night work” implies the revelation of suppressed knowledge, unconscious knowledge, which flowers in “the frolic architecture of the snow” an image which is the poem’s the explicitly stated and demonstrated. If one understands the seemingly opaque diction in the poem’s closing lines, one will have grasped Emerson’s theme, which, like Bryant’s, is to both illustrate and explicate the “enigma” and revelatory aspects of nature simultaneously, elevating human perception and rationality to a level that allows for absolute penetration into the essential verities of the human soul and cosmic being.Bryant’s poem leans much more heavily on a definite personification of Deity, an incontrovertibly Christian vision; however, like Emerson, his carefully plotted prosody and engaging rhyme-scheme betray an impulse toward “humanism;” at least to the extent that Bryant, like most Romantic poets, posited human reason and perception as a microcosmic expression the Divine. The complex prosody and symbolism utilized by both Bryant and Emerson in the poems discussed above illustrate a plastic expression of the assumed Divine forms, hearkening back to the “Forefather of Romanticism”, Plato, whose similar insistence on nature as a gateway to deeper, eternal forms, provided the fertile philosophical ground out of which Romanticism (a neo-platonic aesthetic) fourished.  ReferencesBigelow, J. (1890).

William Cullen Bryant. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.Phelps, W. L. (1924).

Howells, James, Bryant, and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan & Co.Urschel, L. K. (1991).

Emerson’s the Snow-Storm. Explicator, 50(1), 15-16.;;;