"Hamatreya" presents a number of contrasts, each one of which highlights the central, paradoxical turning of the tables on the value traditionally placed by men upon land ownership. In the poem, Emerson opposes materialism and a more spiritual mysticism, reality and illusion, transience and permanence, separateness and unity, and human and universal concepts of history.
Material versus Spiritual
The settlers of Concord who form the subject of the first section of the poem are developed entirely as material men, defined (and defining themselves) solely in terms of their ownership, use, and alteration of the land. Emerson omits to tell the reader anything of them as emotional men, as religious men, or intellectual men, choosing instead to focus on their material orientation. (Significantly, in the 1876 revised version of the poem, in which Peter Bulkeley — Emerson's ancestor and the first minister and a founder of Concord — is placed at the beginning of the list of settlers, there is no hint of the fact that Bulkeley came from England for religious purposes.)
The purely physical nature of the founders' appreciation of their land is emphasized in the listings of their concrete and specific crops and commodities ("Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood") and of the resources they exploited ("We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge, / And misty lowland, where to go for peat"). Even their enjoyment of their land is expressed in terms of owning features of the landscape, through the use of the possessive "my": "How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees! / How graceful climb those shadows on my hill!" The Earth-Song, by contrast, conveys a more mystical, encompassing, spiritually suggestive vision of the permanence of nature as it exists independently of the claims and actions of these men
