Claiming that the person who is most likely to see the whole of things is the poet, Emerson differentiates between the poet and other people: The poet, he says, is one of the few people who can see nature plainly, not superficially, as most of us do. In order for us to see nature plainly, we must cast off old ways of seeing. Here, again, the theme of casting off is present: Instead of the theories and the past ("the dry bones") that Emerson said needed to be discarded, the person who yearns to see with new eyes must cast off years like a snake sheds its skin, revealing the child within. A child, Emerson says, accepts nature as it is rather than manipulating it into something it is not, as an adult would do.
Emerson states that when he himself stands in the woods, he feels the Universal Being flowing through him. This notion of the Universal Being, which he identifies with God, is what many readers identify as transcendentalism. Every object in nature, including each human, partakes of this animating life force; through it, all objects in nature are linked. However, Emerson suggests a paradoxical relationship when he writes, "I am nothing. I see all." Finding oneself only by first losing oneself is a recurring — and puzzling — theme in much transcendental thinking. We must read many of Emerson's ideas symbolically rather than literally, and, above all, we should remember the importance of his message and not get sidetracked by the images he uses to communicate his ideas.
Finally, Emerson returns to the key idea in the poetic line of Plotinus: Nature does not have a personality that it alone devises. Humans, he says, who are paramount over nature, grant to it human characteristics we perceive it to have.
