Ralph Waldo Emerson examining a crystal at a desk beneath a tree

A crystal soul at the edge of the sea

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), an American poet and essayist, takes his poet down to the sea. On the way the man has delighted in harebells nodding on a rock as readily as in the company of people who live in huts or palaces. At the shore his eye first follows the wheeling seabirds skimming the waves. Only when he stands facing the tumbling water does Emerson give him a soul of crystal.

What the wind does to the poet

And he the bard, a crystal soul
Sphered and concentric with the whole.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems, undated (1899 or later), p. 265.[1]

Crystal and sea make an unlikely pair. The waves tumble over one another. A crystal held in the hand would keep its shape even if the person holding it were almost giddy with joy. That is precisely how Emerson describes the poet’s state. In the lines leading up to the crystal image, sea and sky seem to enter his body. It is as if the sky were walking about inside him, as if the winds took on flesh and the mountains spoke. The body that a moment ago stood on the shore becomes, in imagination, the place where all this happens.

Sharing a centre

To follow the last line, try drawing two circles of different sizes. Set the point of the compass down in the same spot twice and the two will have a common centre while each keeps its own circumference. Emerson finds an exact way of describing what the poet experiences by the sea. He can share in the life around him and still have a place from which to look and speak. His crystal soul takes shape at the very moment when the boundaries he knows begin to shift.