Today’s Poem: To the Fringed Gentian

William Cullen Bryant’s Transcendentalist hope

Fringed Gentian, Field Book of American Wild Flowers, 1912 (Wikimedia Commons)

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To the Fringed Gentian

by William Cullen Bryant

Thou blossom bright with autumn dew,
And colored with the heaven’s own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night.

Thou comest not when violets lean
O’er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o’er the ground-bird’s hidden nest.

Thou waitest late and com’st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end.

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue-blue-as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.

I would that thus, when I shall see
The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.

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At seventeen, William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was already at work on the poem we all know, from our high-school American-literature textbooks, as  “Thanatopsis.” We know this poem as “Thanatopsis” — in fact, we know it at all — because in 1817, the editors of the North American Review assigned the title to some random pages which Bryant’s father had picked up from his son’s desk and sent to the Review, along with a selection of his own poems. 

The poem that put the younger Bryant on the map of American letters first appeared in haphazard fragments, under a title its author never chose, and under the elder Bryant’s name. The resulting editorial embarrassment opened a door for any future submissions by William Cullen Bryant, which on the whole is not a terrible way to establish a literary reputation. 

And what a reputation Bryant enjoyed during his long life. He was championed by Washington Irving (1783–1859), editor for the first edition, in 1832, of Bryant’s Poems . His fans included Edgar Allan Poe, who called his use of meter “voluptuous,” and children’s author Mary Mapes Dodge, who said that his poems had “wrought vast and far-reaching good in the world.” 

Literary history groups him with the Fireside Poets, Longfellow, Whittier,  Holmes, & Co., all of whom were, in fact, wreaking similarly vast and far-reaching good in the form of (often) digestible ideas rendered in strict metrical form. Perhaps the most “vast and far-reaching good” these poets wrought was simply that millions of people read, memorized, and recited their poems — that poetry was, for an entire society, a voluntary pleasure. 

William Cullen Bryant (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, “To the Fringed Gentian,” which appears in the 1832 and subsequent editions of Bryant’s Poems, is one of the handful of his poems, with “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl,” that textbook editors tend to choose as representative of his body of work. These poems all highlight the Romanticism that impels him to urge the reader of “Thanatopsis” to “Go forth, under the open sky, and list / To Nature’s teachings.” 

They highlight as well the peculiarly American Transcendentalist turn of Bryant’s Romanticism, with its emphasis on singularity. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson wrote, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist . . . Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Bryant’s own eye turns instinctively to the image of the lone wild duck silhouetted against the sky. Or, as here, in this poem of tetrameter-couplet quatrains, it fastens on the late flower, blooming as the year wanes, its “blue-blue” vivid in the faded landscape. 

More crucially, the flower’s sky-color connects it to heaven, as though, in its lonely glory, it contained something of the divine. What the poem’s speaker aspires to, in his last moments, is that recognition, not of something alien, but of the self’s transcendent source, the “Hope blossoming” in his heart simply an echo and answer to a larger fount of hope. 

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