WARM UP:
 Utilizing your piece of nature….. Write a poem
(5-7 lines!)
 This poem should convey the idea of
transcendentalism
 Does not have to rhyme
 Must utilize at least 3 vocabulary words!
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Need help uninspired?
Describe your piece of nature
Describe your finding of the nature
How has this nature made you feel?
 You
will be turning this in 15 minutes!
 Didn’t bring something…what inspires you in
nature?
TRANSCENDENTALISM REMINDERS
Core beliefs: self-reliance, purity of the imagination, and
inspirational purity of nature
 People are born good and pure.
 Society and its institutions (political orgs and organized religion)
will lead to corruption of the individual
 We can figure out good/bad when we use intuition.
 Strong community comes from strong sense of self.
 Figuring out how to feel about life and using intuition was more
important than logical, scientific approach to life.
 Nature is immune to corruption of society.
 Studying and worshipping it (maybe even living in it-Thoreau) can
teach what it means to be human.

“The Apology” by Emerson

Think me not unkind and rude,
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That I walk alone in grove and glen*;
I go to the god of the wood
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To fetch his word to men.
5
10
15
20
Tax* not my sloth* that I
Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
Writes a letter in my book.
Chide* me not, laborious band*,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster* in my hand
Goes home loaded with a thought.
There was never mystery,
But 'tis figured* in the flowers,
Was never secret history,
But birds tell it in the bowers*.
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1.
2.
3.
One harvest from thy field
4.
Homeward brought the oxen strong; 5.
A second crop thine acres yield,
Which I gather in a song.
grove and glen (2): the woods and fields
Tax (5): make demands or here (more accurately) to
criticize
sloth (5): it’s either a very slow marsupial looking
ape thing or it means to be idle and lazy
chide (9): scold or rebuke
laborious band (9): group of people who are
industrious as opposed to the speaker who clearly
is doin’ nothing.
aster (11): man, that ain’t nothing but a fancy kind
of daisy
figured (14): as in figured out, understood
bowers (16): pleasant shady area under a tree
What does the speaker demand from his
audience in the opening stanza?
Line 4 suggests that the speaker will . . .
Stanzas 2 and 3 suggest that the speaker is lazy.
Why is this not a bad thing?
What “secret history” is revealed by birds (15)?
The use of “song” in the final line. Denotative or
connotative?
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Father of Transcendentalism
 “Trust Thyself”

Wrote: Nature
Self-Reliance
NATURE
BACKGROUND: EMERSON AND “NATURE”
 Emerson
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
was a minister
Leaves position after questioning faith and loss of first wife
Suffers many personal losses after this
 Publishes
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“Nature” in 1836
Culmination of ten years of study, theorizing, and reflection
Represented new philosophy
Way to help readers understand the world around them and
instructs them on how to use nature to find the answers to the
mysteries of the world.
Intro and eight subsequent chapters- each with its own focus
NATURE
 In the presence of nature, Emerson feels
exhilarated, restored, and part of God
 We
delight in nature.
 We
find something in nature as beautiful as our
own spiritual nature.
 Even
though we’re all connected, we shouldn't rely
on each other.
ANNOTATION OF NATURE
Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece.
In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a
bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,
without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good
fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink
of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his
slough, and at what period so ever of life, is always a child. In the
woods, is perpetual youth.
Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a
perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should
tire of them in a thousand years.
NATURE
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing
can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my
eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, —
my head bathed by the blithe (carefree) air, and uplifted into infinite
space, — all mean egotism vanishes.
NATURE
It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For,
nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene
which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of
the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy ( def: gloomy, moody)
today.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring
under calamity (great misfortune), the heat of his own fire hath
sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt
by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand
as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
EMERSON’S NATURE: COMPLETE GUIDED ANNOTATIONS
READING AND ?’S
1.
2.
3.
4.
Why did he write this? What’s his point?
How do man and nature relate to each other?
What does Emerson mean when he says he becomes
"a transparent eye-ball" (442)?
In what way does nature serve as a teacher?
CLOSURE
Emerson is considered the father of transcendentalism, what about
his nature essay do you think made people buy into this
movement?
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5k9x16yYGo
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SELF RELIANCE
NATURE REVIEW:
 What
 What
was the point of this essay?
was he trying to say about nature and human
relationships?
SELF RELIANCE INTRODUCTION:

“There is a time in every man's education when he
arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that
imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better,
for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is
full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him
but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground
which is given to him to till.”
 “Trust
thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
SELF RELIANCE COMPLETE THE GUIDED ANNOTATIONS
 Why
does Emerson see society as the enemy of
individuality?
 What
is the role of nonconformity? What did that
word mean to Emerson?
 How
is trust a part of being self-reliant?
NATURE AND SELF RELIANCE
 With
a partner, take the
annotated guides from both
essays to create:

A 5 pane comic strip (at least 1
character)
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
5 pieces of textual evidence to support
your idea (1 per pane)
A character who embodies what
Emerson was trying to instruct
people to do with both his essays!
CLOSURE:
 What
tenants of transcendentalism does this
exemplify?
“Dead Poets Society”
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnAyr0kWRGE
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