Give All to Love? Each and All?

Love, in all its manifestations and meanings, with all its misdirections, misunderstandings and implications, I embrace. A subject I have an abiding interest in—so many of us do—it offers many invitations and promises, many layers to understand, experiential depths to plumb and heights to scale. It can be an interpersonal, existential, or spiritually quest, any or all.

Regardless, it must be approached with care, consideration, and discernment—to respect the potential for emotional and spiritual growth, even fulfillment, to be sure, but also the potential for emotional disappointment or pain, even distancing disaffection, even harm done. It can fashion the defining highs and lows, the possibilities and realities, that life offers. Here the estimable Ralph Waldo Emerson shares, celebrates, and qualifies some of the possibilities and potential, and the responsibilities and disciplines that should be honored. Mr. Emerson:

 

Give All to Love

 

Give all  to love;

Obey thy heart;

Friends, kindred, days,

Estate, good-fame,

Plans, credit and the Muse,

Nothing refuse.

 

‘T is a brave master;

Let it have scope:

Follow it utterly,

Hope beyond hope:

High and more high

It dives into noon,

With wing unspent,

Untold intent;

But it is a god,

Knows its own path

And the outlets of the sky.

 

It was never for the mean;

It requireth courage stout.

Souls above doubt,

Valor unbending,

It will reward,

They shall return

More than they were,

And ever ascending.

 

Leave all for love;

Yet, hear me, yet,

One word more thy heart behoved,

One pulse more of firm endeavor,

Keep thee to-day,

To-morrow, forever,

Free as an Arab

Of thy beloved.

 

Cling with life to the maid;

But when the surprise,

First vague shadow of surmise

Flits across her bosom young,

Of a joy apart from thee,

Free be she, fancy free;

Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,

Nor the palest rose she flung

From her summer diadem.

 

Though thou loved her as thyself,

As a self of purer clay,

Though her parting dims the day,

Stealing grace from all alive;

Heartily know,

When half-gods go,

The gods arrive.

It is important to note that Emerson believed you could not, or should not, hold so close as to reduce to possession natural things of beauty or people loved. It reduced them to captured or caged versions of themselves, constrained to be something more conforming to another's desires or dictates, something less than what you loved in their unfettered freedom, something less than who or what they were. And if love was in fact a kind of "god," as Emerson states midway through the last poem, I can only surmise that the "half-god" he refers to is an unrequited love, a love departed, or love perverted by trying to possess, constrain or conform the object of one's "love"--whether it is the person loved, the creatures and created things of this world, or our search for peace and identity in God. Thus, only in an attitude of freedom, in a posture of unconstrained expression of identity and views--yours and the beloved's--can love in the full flower of respectful regard, caring, and hope arrive. Only then can the relationship remain fresh, growing, changing, as it is "ever ascending." 

And this brought to mind another poem of Mr. Emerson's that I read early last year: "Each and All," which in some ways makes the point even clearer. I offer here that poem, excerpted, but unedited in the material part. Mr. Emerson:

from Each and All 

I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;--
He sang to my ear,--they sang to my eye.

The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home,
But the poor unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.

 The lover watched his graceful maid,
As 'mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty's best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.

Then I said, "I covet truth; 
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:'--
As I spoke, beneath my feet
the ground pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;--
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

Is it at all suprising that Mary Oliver has long been a fan of Emerson's poetry and transcendentalist philosophy? And the more you read of how each of them poetically treat the flowers and creatures and goings on of God's creation, you sense two kindred spirits who have "yielded [themselves] to the perfect whole."