He'll put foot outdoors, walk, set elbows on a memorial

Sort of rail fence, and consider the extent of his acres:

What grew overnight, and what didn't, and why. World-shakers,

Makers and movers. Always why, from what root and animal.

He'll have pulled our boundaries edge to edge to his:

There we'll be: wild deer and full professors, colleagues

And sea-gulls commingled, deans, crows, and hedgehogs,

Janitors and writers and students, and he our St. Francis.

We're there, and the fence and fields, and a chipping

And shining that might be students, or pages or words

On pages we printed or they wrote, or might be birds

In a calendar of flight longer than there's time for mapping.

What a haunting we wish him, beasts, books, and sparrows!

He might not be much dismayed, and then again he might.

Yet the ring round him bounding him would be ghosted light,

Brushed in so lightly for such a gallery of heroes,

The Concord and Hanover sparrows, and Henry, would peer

Round our shoulders and Whitman's beard, and know it meant

They were about to be in a picture Andy Wyeth could paint.

Here the fence, so, Emerson smiling a welcome here.