Days
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Leading American lecturer, poet and essayist. Works include two volumes of essays (1841 and 1844), poems (1847) and numerous individual pieces including the famous essays Nature (1836) showing the natural world with its function to excite the intuition, The American Scholar (1837), Self Reliance (1844) which challenges readers to seek their own truths and the poem Terminus (1866). Emerson was a leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism and Romanticism and a strong influence on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson.

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Days
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

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Days by Ralph Waldo Emerson