Fragments from Emerson’s prose essay “Circles” (1841):

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth
that around every circle another
can be drawn. There is no end in nature,
but every end is a beginning.
There is always another dawn risen
on mid-noon, and under every deep
a lower deep opens. The Greek sculpture
is all melted away. The Greek letters
last a little longer, but are already
passing under the same sentence, tumbling
into the inevitable pit which the
creation of new thought opens for all
that is old. The new continents are built
out of the ruins of an old planet.

The man finishes his story, – how good!
how final! how it puts a new face on
all things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the other side
rises also a man and draws a circle
around the circle we had just pronounced
the outline of the sphere. Then already is
our first speaker not man, but only first
speaker. His redress is forthwith to draw
a circle outside of his antagonist.

In common hours, society sits
cold and statuesque. Then cometh the god
and converts the statues into fiery men,
and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil
which shrouded all things, and the meaning of
the very furniture, of cup and saucer,
or chair and clock and tester, is manifest.

The natural world may be conceived of
as a system of concentric circles,
and we now and then detect in nature
slight dislocations which apprize us that
this surface on which we stand is not fixed,
but sliding.

I am gladdened by beholding that no
evil is pure, nor hell itself without
its extreme satisfactions. But let me
remind the reader that I am only
an experimenter. Do not set the least
value on what I do, or the least discredit
on what I do not, as if I pretended
to settle any thing as true or false.
I unsettle all things, an endless seeker
with no Past at my back.

Tethered sailboats hunched in a row.
A gull sails the diagonal, taut and low.
Wind and sinking sun scribble the bay
With fleeting streaks of blue, green, gray.

No Atlantic lobstermen in my line
(Grim faces leathered from the frozen brine),
Nor any yachtsmen forebears in blue and gold.
I stand uneasy in the twilit cold.

We turn past the point and leave the bay.
The waves foam up and throw the wind their spray,
Soaking the windshields in the ferry’s hold.
I stand alone in the whipping cold.

The harbor was not for me; nor was it theirs.
The whole is no one’s, saved for no one’s heirs.
It’s of no account who I may be.
A life is a wave; it is not the sea.

Oblique angles of a ceiling,
matted thatch of loam and grass.
Roughness marks a patch of healing,
finger pads on hard cool glass.
Arc of lights on car’s back window
drum of drops on hooded head.
Curtain’s folds watched from a pillow,
spine unfolding onto bed.
Eyelids pressed in arm’s bend, snug,
hands squeeze hand, eyes find an eye.
As heels compress a homespun rug,
birds on lines hunch in the sky.
From crib to hospice, these we see;
they are what it is to be.

(West Tisbury, MA)

The boy watches fluid in tubes, lab coats,
Hurried sneakers, hushed exchanges, and thinks
He could grow into one who consults notes,
Gives opinions, adjusts that thing that blinks
Beneath the window that reveals the wall
Of the mall, where later he will sip a shake.
The patient, watching the jagged line fall
That charts his spreading, swelling, burning ache,
Was once the boy and still by habit dreams
Of what he might learn to do and become.
No greater sorrow than to recall your schemes
Of futures past when at last you must succumb.
I am the patient and the boy, hoping I
Will forget these lines when finally I lie.

The first 21 lines of Catullus’ Song 64, in my translation:

Sprouted at the peak of Mt. Pelion,
the pines, they say, pushed right through Neptune’s waves
to the surf at Phasis, Aeëtes’ realm,
when the hand-picked force, those young oaks of Greece,
wanting to snatch from Colchis the Golden Fleece,
risked riding the salty waves on a ship,
and brushed the sky-blue sea with fir-wood oars.
Athena, who protects their citadel,
invented their light flying vehicle,
weaving the pine boards into one curved keel.

This ship was a first for the sea goddess.
When with its prow it plowed her wind-blown swell,
and its oar strokes sprayed white spume on her waves,
a face arose from the froth-covered strait,
a miracle the sea nymphs marveled at.

This one and many others they beheld,
the mortals, staring in the ocean sun:
nymphs rising out, naked, breasts in the foam.

Then Peleus was on fire for the nymph Thetis.
Then Thetis was not above a human match.
Then even father Jupiter knew it:
she was meant to be wife for Peleus.

(The whole long poem is well translated by Thomas Banks. The Latin I used is here.)