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Days: A Poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson

© Linda Sue Grimes

Days

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."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

This tiny Emerson poem continues to attract attention, because of the ambiguity of the word "hypocritic." Readers choose sides in the debate according to the meaning of "hypocritic days." One side claims that the days are "actors"; while the other argues that they are "deceivers." Edward G. Fletcher (The Explicator, April 1947) argued "deceivers," and Joseph Jones (The Explicator, April 1946) argued "actors." The editors of The Explicator in November, 1945, had taken the side of "deceivers" while James E. White, writing in ESQ in 1963, formulated his thesis around "actors."

Because poetic language resonates, often relying on ambiguity or many layered meanings, I suggest we may understand the term "hypocritic" in Emerson's poem as resonating both meanings, "actors" and deceivers."

Actually, the two terms are not mutually exclusive. In a sense actors are deceiving, because they are pretending to be other than they are, but I suggest the real significance of the term, as well as the total meaning of the poem, depends upon the human perception of things in the poem. It is the human mind that conceives the notion of days as "daughters of time." The speaker has learned something by the end of the poem-something that perhaps has taken him a lifetime. He has learned that he has taken from life according to his own will-"To each they offer gifts after his own will."

After this realization, the speaker looks back, and in order to give others a clear image of what he has learned, he personifies the passage of time as "daughters of time." In qualifying the definition of days, the speaker calls them "hypocritic." The "days" are surely actors since the speaker has personified them and portrayed them in a specific role: they act like "barefoot dervishes"; they march "in an endless file"; they "bring diadems and fagots in their hands"; and by the end of the poem, the speaker has even attributed to one of the daughters an attitude, because he sees scorn on her brow-"I, too late, / Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."