Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Good-Bye
1Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home:
2Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine.
3Long through thy weary crowds I roam;
4A river-ark on the ocean brine,
5Long I've been tossed like the driven foam;
6But now, proud world! I'm going home.
7Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face;
8To Grandeur with his wise grimace;
9To upstart Wealth's averted eye;
10To supple Office, low and high;
11To crowded halls, to court and street;
12To frozen hearts and hasting feet;
13To those who go, and those who come;
14Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home.
15I am going to my own hearth-stone,
16Bosomed in yon green hills alone, --
17A secret nook in a pleasant land,
18Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
19Where arches green, the livelong day,
20Echo the blackbird's roundelay,
21And vulgar feet have never trod
22A spot that is sacred to thought and God.
23O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
24I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;
25And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
26Where the evening star so holy shines,
27I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
28At the sophist schools, and the learned clan;
29For what are they all, in their high conceit,
30When man in the bush with God may meet?
Notes
20] roundelay: lyric song with refrain.
23] sylvan: forest.
28] sophist: characterized by weak reasoning.
30] in the bush: God spoke to Moses on mount Horeb out of a burning bush (Exodus 3.2).
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: Poems< (1846: London: Chapman, 1847).
PS 1624 .A1 Robarts Library
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: 2002
Recent editing: 1:2002/12/24
Rhyme: quatrain and couplets
Other poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson
