Poem of the Day: ‘I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beauty’

Born in Boston, Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812–1848) was a woman deep in the councils of the Transcendentalists and a regular poet in the pages of The Dial, their chief New England journal. In her 1840 “I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beauty,” she writes a six-line poem, in tetrameter couplets, about how work, a life of duty, can make real the highest of dreams, a life of beauty.Like much of Hooper’s work before her early death from tuberculosis at age 36, it is a poem that preaches, which may be why we leave her work with a sense of flatness. There’s a sad juxtaposition of sentences in this description: “she was widely regarded as one of the most gifted poets among the New England Transcendentalists. Her work is occasionally reprinted.” And yet, the juxtaposition seems fair. She wrote preachy poems, extolling transcendentalism, which no one much reads any more, but the Transcendentalists thought her the most talented of their poets.The truth is that she was, in some ways, the best of the Transcendentalists — and that leaves us with a question: Why did the Transcendentalists produce such minor poetry? This was a major literary coterie, in a very literary time, and all we’ve got in poetry is some verse from Emerson, dribs and drabs from Thoreau and Alcott, the juvenilia of James Russell Lowell, and even more minor stuff. All the best poetry on transcendentalist themes is Transcendentalist only by courtesy, written by those who had read Emerson or had vaguely parallel thoughts.Something in the philosophy (or pseudo-philosophy, at its gooiest) seemed to fight against the poetic impulse. The transcendentalism of 1830s New England emerged from “democracy in contact with Puritanism,” to use a nice phrase that George Willis Cooke put in the introduction to a 1903 anthology of the New Englanders’ work. And yet, to browse Cooke’s “The Poets of Transcendentalism” is to be struck over and over by the same thought that comes from reading Hooper. Even Cooke, their chief anthologist, concludes, “These poets . . . are so charmed with what they have to say, and it is of such a complex and subjective nature, that they cannot find simple and direct speech for its utterance. Hence the halting nature of their verse, its crippled meters, and its defective rhymes. Too often in their verse they are not poets, but philosophers.”Cooke tends to ascribe the mediocrity of Transcendentalist poetry to the poets, which is certainly possible. But the answer may come in Transcendentalism itself. The goal, as Emerson put it in his famous essay on Nature, is to “become a transparent eye-ball,” absorbing all, reflecting nothing: “I am part or particle of God.” And the particles of God don’t write good poetry. They write stern verse lectures about toil and its striving for beauty, the way Ellen Sturgis Hooper did.I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beautyby Ellen Sturgis HooperI slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;I woke, and found that life was Duty.Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?Toil on, sad heart, courageously,And thou shalt find thy dream to beA noonday light and truth to thee.___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beauty’

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