Today’s Poem: Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America

Time’s noblest Offspring is the last

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861 mural in the United States Capitol Building (Wikimedia Commons)

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Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America

by George Berkeley

The Muse, disgusted at an Age and Clime,
Barren of every glorious Theme,
In distant Lands now waits a better Time,
Producing subjects worthy Fame:

In happy Climes, where from the genial Sun
And virgin Earth such Scenes ensue,
The Force of Art by Nature seems outdone,
And fancied Beauties by the true:

There shall be sung another golden Age,
The rise of Empire and of Arts,
The Good and Great inspiring epic Rage,
The wisest Heads and noblest Hearts.

Not such as Europe breeds in her decay;
Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heav’nly Flame did animate her Clay,
By future Poets shall be sung.

Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way;
The four first Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day;
Time’s noblest Offspring is the last.
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These days, George Berkeley (1685-1753), Anglican bishop of Cloyne, is best known as a philosopher — widely known, better known as a philosopher than he was in his lifetime.

Joining John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776) in what’s now recognized as the triumvirate of foundational British empiricists with A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713), Berkeley laid out a curious empirical idealism that argued both for the epistemological primacy of experience (“esse is percipi”) and the metaphysical primacy of ideas. If you’ve heard the old philosophical saw about if a tree falls in a forest with no one around, or Boswell’s tale of Samuel Johnson’s refuting the philosophy by kicking a rock, you’ve encountered something of Berkeley’s philosophical thought.

As it happens, he also wrote about Christian doctrine, the apprehension of the eyes, Newtonian space, the benefits of using tarwater, and the need to build a new college — even a new town — in Bermuda.

That project to establish a new-world college failed, although it would see him come to Rhode Island and donate to Yale when he returned to England. But it prompted Today’s Poem in 1726.

John Smibert’s 1730 portrait of George Berkeley (Wikimedia Commons)

And the afterlife of the poem — by a man not known for his poetry — made it one of the established American classics through the 19th century. The 1861 mural in the U.S. capitol building, on the side of the House of Representatives, is titled Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. And both the California university and town took their name in remembrance of that line opening the final stanza of the poem. (They would pronounce his name BERK-lee, although the received pronunciation of is BARK-lee.)

Appearing in Berkeley’s 1752 A Miscellany, Containing Several Tracts on Various Subjects, the poem offered plenty for a nascent American pride — promising in the New World the “wisest Heads and noblest Hearts,” and “Not such as Europe breeds in her decay; / Such as she bred when fresh and young.” The Muse is disgusted with England in that age, “Barren of every glorious Theme,” but in America “There shall be sung another golden Age” — for “Time’s noblest Offspring is the last.”

Competent verse — in a time in which everyone who wrote could produce correct verse — the poem is not particularly inspired. Still, in five stanzas, alternating five- and four-foot lines rhymed abab, “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” seems worth returning to memory as the poem that through the 19th century stood as a figure for an American optimism and pride in the unfolding future.

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