The promise of each morning: Days, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 

Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 

And marching single in an endless file, 

Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 

To each they offer gifts after his will, 

Bread, kingdoms, stars, or sky that holds them all. 

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 

Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 

Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 

Turned and departed silent. I, too late, 

Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

Days - by Ralph Waldo Emerson

**

I don't especially like Days as poetry (nor, indeed, any poetry of Emerson's) - but its "message", its cry, is one that returns frequently to my mind. 

It is (I think) about the promise felt by people such as Emerson and myself, at the start of a day - the promise of each day, its gifts, and what we might do with them - compared with the inevitable disillusionment of the day's end, when we have not done much, or anything at all.  

This sentiment contrasts with the youthful optimism for the sunny future expressed in many other places by Emerson, that sense that on just such a day as this, a man such as Shakespeare, wrote something like Hamlet... and, if him, then why not me? (In my own way, at at my own level.) 

The idea that nothing is stopping us, but our own narrowness of vision and triviality of ambition...

In truth, it is the mismatch between optimism and actuality that leads to the disillusionment. Emerson felt great powers in himself; and indeed achieved greatly - but realized that whatever he had achieved was in the past, and he was always concerned primarily by the potential of the present moment. 

Shakespeare looking back on having writt-en Hamlet was (no doubt) a very different, and probably sadder, creature than Shakespeare actually writ-ing Hamlet. 

This is the human condition; and apparently nobody has ever eluded it - except by the suppression or obliteration of awareness that it is true. 

And this is exactly why the only escape from wise pessimism - from that stoic attitude which is only divided from rational suicide by irrational (yet true) residual scruples - is to know our mortal lives to be a stage or phase of experience that is both contributing towards, and destined to transform into, resurrection and the reality of a fulfilled life to come. 

Eternal Heavenly life is not, therefore, a compensation for the deficits we now suffer. Neither is it a time of happiness nor of perfection (whatever they may be...). 

It is instead a life in which the limitations of infirmity of will, of death (entropy), and of evil in and around us - are left-behind; and we can then fulfil that "morning feeling" so valued, yet mourned, by Emerson. 

We are not supposed to look-forward to life beyond life, as if it was a holiday - wanting to shorten or hasten-through the intervening days before we can quit the "work" of this world forever, and live in (perpetual!) leisure.... 

But instead, we should think of Heaven as a situation where we can get on with our real work; without having it continually dismantled by the fading of memory and the hazards of this-world. And having prepared our-selves as best we may by the experiences of this-life; acknowledging the-reality-of, learning-from, and seeing-beyond, Emersonian disillusionment. 

Such disappointment with ourselves for wasted days is valid; but it is a lesson, not a conclusion. .