I. <br />Winters know <br />Easily to shed the snow, <br />And the untaught Spring is wise <br />In cowslips and anemones. <br />Nature, hating art and pains, <br />Baulks and baffles plotting brains; <br />Casualty and Surprise <br />Are the apples of her eyes; <br />But she dearly loves the poor, <br />And, by marvel of her own, <br />Strikes the loud pretender down. <br /> <br />For Nature listens in the rose, <br />And hearkens in the berry's bell, <br />To help her friends, to plague her foes, <br />And like wise God she judges well. <br />Yet doth much her love excel <br />To the souls that never fell, <br />To swains that live in happiness, <br />And do well because they please, <br />Who walk in ways that are unfamed, <br />And feats achieve before they're named. <br /> <br />II. <br /> <br />She is gamesome and good, <br />But of mutable mood,-- <br />No dreary repeater now and again, <br />She will be all things to all men. <br />She who is old, but nowise feeble, <br />Pours her power into the people, <br />Merry and manifold without bar, <br />Makes and moulds them what they are, <br />And what they call their city way <br />Is not their way, but hers, <br />And what they say they made to-day, <br />They learned of the oaks and firs. <br />She spawneth men as mallows fresh, <br />Hero and maiden, flesh of her flesh; <br />She drugs her water and her wheat <br />With the flavours she finds meet, <br />And gives them what to drink and eat; <br />And having thus their bread and growth, <br />They do her bidding, nothing loath. <br />What's most theirs is not their own, <br />But borrowed in atoms from iron and stone, <br />And in their vaunted works of Art <br />The master-stroke is still her part.<br /><br />Ralph Waldo Emerson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/nature-134/
