"Terrible simplicity": Emerson's metaleptic style - 19th-century poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson

Style, Spring, 1997 by Eric Wilson

Emerson structurally mimics his upsetting of traditional Christianity and prepares the reader for the Visionary's becoming "nothing" and seeing "all" by employing the figure of hyperbaton, inverting normal syntax. In "Almost I fear to think how glad I am," Emerson transposes the normal pattern of "I almost fear." This reversal not only highlights the word "almost," thus reinforcing the fact that the Visionary is at a threshold, but also corresponds to Emerson's reversals of darkness and light, imperfection and perfection, nothing and all. A second hyperbaton occurring in the phrase "at what period soever of life," which reverses the normal order of "at whatsoever period of life," further underpins these transpositions. Hyperbaton, Longinus observes, contributes to a sublime style, for it is a departure "in the order of expressions or ideas from the natural sequence." As such, it is "the stamp or impress of vehement emotion" (103). Its inversion, Longinus adds, resembles the force of a veering wind (103). Just as Emerson's use of vivid imagery both reinforces abstract notions and moves readers, his employment of hyperbaton not only supports the paradoxes charging the passage, but also agitates the reader.

Through the figure anaphora, Emerson further subverts Christianity. In the three phrases beginning with "In the woods," he suggests that nature is a site not only of innocence and youth, but also of "reason," or knowledge, and "faith," or religion. Emerson supports this suggestion by echoing and revising Revelation. In nature, a "perennial festival is dressed." This festival revises the marriage festival for the Lamb and New Jerusalem in Revelation 19:9: "And he said unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb." This festival, M. H. Abrams observes, symbolizes the marriage between God and man in heaven after the world-ending apocalypse (42-43). For Emerson, the marriage festival of God and man takes place not in heaven in the future, but in nature in the present.

Again, Emerson's syntax strengthens the semantic aspect of his rhetoric. Anaphora, Longinus notes, advances sublimity by "striking the mind" of the reader, "by the swift succession of blow on blow" (101). Like a series of gusts of wind, anaphora, working in conjunction with other figures, stirs "the blood," continually assailing the auditor (101). Emerson, then, hammers his inversion of Christianity home: "In the woods, . . . a man . . . is a child," "In the woods, is perpetual youth," "In the woods, we return to reason and faith." Though humans have been cast from the garden of Eden into the forest, they retain their innocence, knowledge, faith. The syntactic rhymes of anaphora not only reinforce this idea through repetition, but signal an intensified praise of nature. A second element of the anaphora designates the woods as a site not merely of childhood, but of perpetual or eternal youth. A third element announces that the woods are not only a site of eternal innocence, but of knowledge and faith. The increased energy in praising the woods structurally mimics the gusts of wind that signal a coming storm. Just as each gust leading to a storm is stronger than the last, until finally the sky explodes, so these repeated prepositional phrases signal an increase in verbal energy that will break into a rhetorical storm in the transparent eye-ball sentence that gathers each element of the anaphora into unity as the Visionary becomes one with God, in perfect innocence, faith, and knowledge. Both the Visionary and the readers are part of the tension as they experience the gathering of these forces, anticipating an unleashing of lightning.