Sparks of the supersolar blaze.
Merlin's blows are strokes of fate,
Chiming with the forest tone,
When boughs buffet boughs in the wood;
Chiming with the gasp and moan
Of the ice-imprisoned flood;
With the pulse of manly hearts;
With the voice of orators;
With the din of city arts;
With the cannonade of wars;
With the marches of the brave;
And prayers of might from martyrs' cave.
Great is the art,
Great be the manners, of the bard.
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhythm and number;
But, leaving rule and pale forethought,
He shall aye climb
For his rhyme.
The true poet exudes greatness in his work and behavior –  that  is the meaning of poetry. Any additional burdens, like calculation of feet and metric arrangement, can cripple the poetic genius. 
 Virginia Woolf once confessed, “I cannot tell a  dactyl  from an  iambic .” More surprisingly,  T. S. Eliot  has admitted, “I have never been able to retain the names of feet and metres, or to pay the proper respect to the accepted rules of  scansion .” There’s something about meter that troubles writers (especially in the 20th century), and Emerson was one of the first to vocalize that problem with formulaic and rigid poetry. 
 
 Interestingly enough , eight years after this poem was written,  Walt Whitman  published a book of poems written in  free verse , breaking the norms of meter and structured rhythm. Whitman was later called the  American bard .