Emerson's ‘Apparition of God’ and Frost's ‘Apparition of the Mind’

Emerson's 'Apparition of God' and Frost's 'Apparition of the Mind' I In 'Nature' Emerson wrote: 'the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God: When he said that 'man lies in the lap ofimmense intelligence,' 'sits at home with the cause,' he meant that man sits in the midst of God's things and can learn the secret of God's truth. Emerson put aside the stale scriptures of bygone revelations because he preferred present ones: 'God speaks, not spake: He remarked in 'Self-Reliance' that 'all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth: One of the most venerable myths of a person's having a moment of reason when he looked into the region of absolute truth is the story of Moses' meeting with God in the Burning Bush on Mount Horeb: And Moses said unto God, Behold, when Icome unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM. (Exodus 3:13-14) The problem of the incommunicability of the truth of revelation is raised in Moses' question about how to verify his report to the people, and God's nugatory reply. Report of revelation is mere hearsay truth. Everyone must get his own revelation. Emerson's early poem 'Good-Bye, Proud World' is a valediction to worldliness which concludes with the statement that the poet is going home to the solitude of green hills 'where man in the bush with God may meet: In his similar early poem of farewell to the proud world, 'Into My Own: Frost no longer expects to find his sylvan home a 'spot sacred to thought and God: He only wishes that the dark trees were not 'the merest mask of gloom: but that they 'stretched away unto the edge of doom' (a phrase for ultimate revelation echoing Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI). If they were such an avenue into the Absolute, he would 'steal away' into it. (His poem 'Build Soil' reminds, 'Steal away the song says. Steal away and stay away:) But Frost's dark trees are not the bush where man can meet God; they are only an equivalent figure for his wish to do so. Frost's most explicitly sceptical use of the Burning Bush myth of revelation occurs in the poem 'Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight: His UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLVIII, NUMBER I , FALL 1978 0042-0247'7811 100-0041 $01.50/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1978 burning bush is one illuminated by a merely natural light. As he sits by it, awaiting a moment when he may look into 'the region of absolute truth,' the only influence reaching him is a sensation merely physical, a ray of warmth from the sun To feel of between thumb and fingers; No lasting effect of it lingers. Although 'men have watched a long time,' they no longer receive revelations : God once declared he was true And then took the veil and withdrew, And remember how final a hush Then descended of old on the bush. The Burning Bush myth is employed with the even deeper scepticism provided by irony in The Masque of Reason, where it is used as the setting for dramatic dialogue about God's appearance to man. Here Frost describes the Burning Bush as an 'incense tree' or 'Christmas tree,' a creation of the artistic imagination like Yeats's Byzantium. Frost's 'gold enameled nightingales' made by Greek artificers are unmistakably reminiscent of the golden birds on golden boughs made by Grecian goldsmiths in Yeats's poems. The God who appears in this artificial burning bush is likewise a figment of imagination. Job's wife identifies him thus: 'It's God. I'd know him by Blake's picture anywhere.' That is, God's identity has been bestowed on him by the imagination of the artist. God is a big Nobodaddy up aloft. Frost postulated God as a metaphor for something...