Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale

New release

May-Day and Other Pieces by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

May-Day and Other Pieces

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Narrator Mark Bowen

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more

Length 2 hours 9 minutes

Language English

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Summary
About the author

Spring arrives with a rush of words, and Ralph Waldo Emerson stands at the threshold, pen in hand. May-Day and Other Pieces is not just a collection of poems—it is an invitation to witness the shifting tides of nature, thought, and destiny through the eyes of one of America's sharpest philosophical minds.
From the awakening landscapes of May-Day to the untamed wilderness of The Adirondacs, Emerson moves effortlessly between the grandeur of the world and the depths of the soul. The mysticism of Brahma, the inevitability of Fate, the defiance of Freedom—each poem is a meditation, a spark meant to ignite the reader's own reflection. History echoes in the Boston Hymn, sung as the Civil War reshaped a nation, while the lyrical simplicity of My Garden and Seashore captures fleeting moments of peace amid the rush of existence.
Yet, Emerson never lingers too long in stillness. He follows the restless course of Two Rivers, listens to the quiet solitude of Waldeinsamkeit, and faces the finality of Terminus with unwavering clarity. This is poetry that questions, poetry that endures. It is a journey through seasons, through America, through the self—one that leaves the reader standing on the shore, looking out at the vastness, changed.
May-Day and Other Pieces is more than verse. It is a conversation with the universe, and Emerson, ever the sage, is still speaking.
Contents
• May-Day
• The Adirondacs
A Journal
Dedicated to my Fellow Travellers IN August, 1858
• Brahma
• Nemesis
• Fate
• Freedom
• Ode Sung in the Town Hall, Concord, July 4, 1857
• Boston Hymn, Read in Music Hall, January 1, 1863
• Voluntaries
• Love and Thought
• Una
• Boston
• Letters
• Rubies
• Merlin's Song
• The Test
• Solution
• Hymn Sung at the Second Church, at the Ordination of Rev. Chandler Robbins
• Nature I
• Nature II
• The Romany Girl
• Days
• My Garden
• The Chartist's Complaint
• The Titmouse
• The Harp
• Seashore
• Song of Nature
• Two Rivers
• Waldeinsamkeit
• Terminus
• The Nun's Aspiration
• April
• Maiden Speech of the Aeolian Harp
• Cupido
• The Past
• The Last Farewell
Lines written by the author's brother, Edward Bliss Emerson, whilst sailing out of Boston Harbor, bound for the island of Porto Rico, in 1832
• In Memoriam E. B. E.

Fiction Poetry

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was a writer, lecturer, and thinker who reshaped American intellectual life. Born in Boston into a family of ministers, he lost his father at eight and was raised by a fiercely determined mother. He attended Harvard at fourteen, briefly taught school, and then followed family tradition into the ministry. But the death of his first wife, Ellen, in 1831 shattered his faith in organized religion. He resigned from the church and set off for Europe, where he met the great minds of his time—Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth—who deepened his belief in individual thought over inherited dogma. Back in America, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and became the leading voice of transcendentalism. His 1836 essay Nature called for a new way of seeing the world—one that placed intuition above reason and the divine within the self. His lectures and essays, including Self-Reliance and The American Scholar, urged Americans to trust their own voices rather than look to Europe for intellectual authority. A magnetic speaker, Emerson crisscrossed the country delivering lectures on topics ranging from history to self-improvement. He mentored Henry David Thoreau and influenced countless others, from Walt Whitman to Friedrich Nietzsche. Despite his growing fame, he remained a private man, happiest in his study or walking through the woods of Concord. In later years, his memory faded, and he quietly withdrew from public life. Yet his words endured, shaping generations of writers, philosophers, and seekers. His call for self-reliance and intellectual independence remains as relevant today as it was in his time.