La rivale della rosa: i canti di primavera e i fiori di Emerson

“I am born a poet,” Emerson confessed to Lydia Jackson in 1835, while he was working at his first, “little book” about nature. His “singing,” however, was not only “in prose,” as in fact evidenced by his powerful verse of 1834: four poems that influenced Nature as much as the composition of Nature influenced them. This essay explores one of those lyrics of 1834, “The Rhodora,” a song of Spring celebrating the “rival of the rose” in the American “solitudes.” “Spreading its leafless blooms” in the wilderness, the flower emerges in its luminous essence of seeming, a self-manifestation that, by some superior design, fulfills an absolute moment of aesthetic affinity and spiritual election, a moment of faith and vision of the “Anointed” I/eye before the unfolding of Nature’s “Beauty.”