David Baker's Heresy & the Ideal

[alice wellintown]

Romanticism by David Baker

It is to Emerson I have turned now,
damp February, for he has written
of the moral harmony of nature.
The key to every man is his thought.
But Emerson, half angel, suffers his
dear Ellen’s dying only half-consoled
that her lungs shall no more be torn nor her


head scalded by her blood, nor her whole life
suffer from the warfare between the force
& delicacy of her soul & the
weakness of her frame . . . March the 29th,
1832, of an evening strange
with dreaming, he scribbles, I visited
Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=175835


http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/byrnereviewbaker.html