In early May I was traipsing through the woods behind my cabin in Maine. No leaves were open and the ground and was dark and gloomy with winter inertia. To my surprise, I saw an intricate bloom of shades of purple that stood out in that desolate space. I had never seen that flower, called rhodora, before. Somewhat by chance I came across a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson written in 1834 about that flower that I had just discovered. Later I found a clump of rhodora blooms in a spaghnum bog near the Bigelow mountain range. There I saw purple petals in the water just as Emerson described 170 years ago.
On
being asked, whence is the flower.
In
May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.