Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mithridates

Mithridates - meaning Summary

Embracing Worldly Appetite

Emerson’s poem asserts a voracious, experimental appetite for the world’s substances, creatures, and experiences. The speaker rejects narrow asceticism and vows to sample everything—benign and poisonous, commonplace and exotic—embracing risk and sensation as a way to know life. The catalogue of flora, fauna, drugs, and tools dramatizes a will to be filled and used by the world rather than hidden; public exposure and engagement are preferred to solitary withdrawal.

Read Complete Analyses

I cannot spare water or wine, Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose; From the earth-poles to the Line, All between that works or grows, Every thing is kin of mine. Give me agates for my meat, Give me cantharids to eat, From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and altitudes. From all natures, sharp and slimy, Salt and basalt, wild and tame, Tree, and lichen, ape, sea-lion, Bird and reptile be my game. Ivy for my fillet band, Blinding dogwood in my hand, Hemlock for my sherbet cull me, And the prussic juice to lull me, Swing me in the upas boughs, Vampire-fanned, when I carouse. Too long shut in strait and few, Thinly dieted on dew, I will use the world, and sift it, To a thousand humors shift it, As you spin a cherry. O doleful ghosts, and goblins merry, O all you virtues, methods, mights; Means, appliances, delights; Reputed wrongs, and braggart rights; Smug routine, and things allowed; Minorities, things under cloud! Hither! take me, use me, fill me, Vein and artery, though ye kill me; God! I will not be an owl, But sun me in the Capitol.

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