Video narration
If you found a wildflower blooming alone in the woods, would you wonder who it was for? That's where Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem The Rhodora begins: the speaker comes upon a bright flower near a brook, where few people may see it. He asks why it blooms there. When you find one on a walk, it's easy to think its beauty is waiting for someone to notice. But Emerson turns the question around. The flower isn't waiting for us. Its beauty is enough in itself. The speaker imagines that the same unnamed Power brought both him and the flower there-a shared source the poem does not name more specifically. That wildflower isn't decoration for a passerby. It belongs there whether anyone finds it or not. Yes. That wildflower's beauty doesn't need an audience to justify it-that's Emerson's point: "Beauty is its own excuse for being."