In class we were told to never skip the epigraph because it is almost always very important to the story it proceeds. I love to write, generally poetry, and often times my poem barely resembles what I have titled it, but the title is important to the message of the story. Sometimes the title is meant to make the person think deeper about the poem than what I've actually written. And even if I have left the poem untitled, that is just as significant. Just as titles are often there to make us think deeper into the meaning of something, epigraphs are meant to as well.
I believe this epigraph perfectly represents the comment I made in class on Tuesday: about nature being the starting point for Man thinking. Nature when you think about it, is pure clean and untouched. It is the untouched canvas of beauty and chaos combined. Ephemerals, in nature, are plants marked by short life cycle (stolen from wiki) ephemeral the word means transitory or quickly fading. In "Circles" Emerson suggest that we are constantly making new circles, in life and in thought. That to become Man Thinking we must constantly draw another circle around the starting point. The last lines in the poem "Knew they what that signified/ A new genesis were here." Though I am not religious, Emerson was. Genesis immediately made me think of the bible. It is the first book of the bible, where it all begins. Nature is our genesis, we should form our minds from the beginning as an untouched canvas, ready for us to develop it to benifit not only ourselves but others around us.
This is not only the message of the epigraph, but also the message of circles. "Nature centres into balls/ and her proud ephermerals" Nature constantly cycles itself, dying and regrowing in its own due time. Nature is it's own circle. But most importantly, and what I was trying to portray in this blog is that the epigraph sums up the meaning of the essay.
We should all be in constant circles. Dying and regrowing in due time, starting over from our beginning, our genesis, when needed; but more often adding to our story.
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I too felt like the last line was extremely important, the emphasis on the genesis of each circle is basically the entire meaning of Emerson's work, that and to set up a stepping stone for man thinking. I thought you explained it well, good job!
ReplyDeleteSounds good, Meredith. As an aside, titles, like epigraphs (and a whole hosts of other things), are what are known as paratexts -- things that accompany the published work. The theorist who is at the center of paratextual analysis is named Gerard Genette,
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