Henry David Thoreau

“ Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
⁠Which outward nature wears,
And in its fashion's hourly change
⁠It all things else repairs.
In vain I look for change abroad,
⁠And can no difference find,
Till some new ray of peace uncalled
⁠Illumes my inmost mind.
What is it gilds the trees and clouds,
⁠And paints the heavens so gay,
But yonder fast-abiding light
⁠With its unchanging ray? ”

“ Prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears
Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms
From either end of Heaven the welkin burns.'
Away! away! away! away!
⁠Ye have not kept your secret well,
I will abide that other day,
⁠Those other lands ye tell.
Has time no leisure left for these,
⁠The acts that ye rehearse?
Is not eternity a lease
⁠For better deeds than verse?
'Tis sweet to hear of heroes dead,
⁠To know them still alive,
But sweeter if we earn their bread,
⁠And in us they survive. ”

“ Lowly the mourners all
⁠Their passage grope;
No sable hue
Mars the serene blue
⁠Of heaven's cope.
In distant dell
Faint sounds the funeral bell;
⁠A heavenly chime;
Some poet there
Weaves the light-burthened air
⁠Into sweet rhyme. ”

“ Thoreau’s view of the poetic character, as stated by him in The Week, is illustrative of his own position. ‘A true poem,’ he says, ‘is distinguished not so much by a felicitous expression, or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it. There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the other art: one seeks food for nutriment, the other for flavor; one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate.’ There can be no doubt to which of these classes Thoreau himself belongs. ”

“ It was his destiny to be one of the greatest prose writers whom America has produced, and he had a strong, perhaps an exaggerated, sense of the dignity of this calling. 'Great prose,' he thinks, 'of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse, since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. ”

“ Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,
⁠Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again,
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,
⁠Nor Shakespeare's books, unless his books were men.
Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
⁠What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
⁠Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?
Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,
⁠If red or black the gods will favor most,
Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,
⁠Struggling to heave some rock against the host. ”

“ I say, Turn it out doors,
Into the moors.
I love a life whose plot is simple,
And does not thicken with every pimple,
A soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it,
That makes the universe no worse than 't finds it. ”

“ Summer and winter, night and day,
Out on the meadow, there dwell they.
They never die,
Nor snivel, nor cry,
Nor ask our pity
With a wet eye.
A sound estate they ever mend,
To every asker readily lend ”

“ Everything that concerns a great writer has its special interest; and Thoreau’s poetry, whatever its intrinsic value may be, is full of personal significance; in fact, as Emerson remarked, ‘his biography is in his verses.’ Thus, many of these poems will be found to throw light on certain passages of his life. ‘Inspiration,’ for example, is the record of his soul’s awakening to the new impulse of transcendentalism; the stanzas on ‘Sympathy’ perhaps contain in a thinly disguised form the story of his youthful love, and the sacrifice which he imposed on himself to avoid rivalry with his brother ”

“ And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath,
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill,
And warmed the pinions of the early bird;
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air,
Has caught sight of the day o'er the earth's edge,
And greets its master's eye at his low door,
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky. ”

“ Behind each needle of the pine
⁠There lurks a small auxiliar to the night.
I hear the cricket's slumbrous lay
⁠Around, beneath me, and on high;
It rocks the night, it soothes the day,
⁠And everywhere is Nature's lullaby. ”

“ The poet only makes an irruption, like a Parthian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered, like a Roman, and settled colonies.’
If, therefore, we cannot unreservedly place Thoreau among the poetical brotherhood, we may at least recognise that he was a poet in the larger sense in which his friends so regarded him—he felt, thought, acted, and lived as a poet, though he did not always write as one. ”

“ I'll be thy Mercury,
Thou Cytherea to me,
Distinguished by thy face
The earth shall learn my place;
As near beneath thy light
Will I outwear the night,
⁠With mingled ray
Leading the westward way. ”

“ There is a vale which none hath seen,
Where foot of man has never been,
Such as here lives with toil and strife,
An anxious and a sinful life.
There every virtue has its birth,
Ere it descends upon the earth,
And thither every deed returns,
Which in the generous bosom burns. ”

“ If God has made me naked and a boor,
⁠He did not think it fit his work to shroud.
The poor man comes direct from heaven to earth,
⁠As stars drop down the sky, and tropic beams;
The rich receives in our gross air his birth,
⁠As from low suns are slanted golden gleams. ”

“ DING DONG [1]
When the world grows old by the chimney-side,
Then forth to the youngling nooks I glide,
Where over the water and over the land
The bells are booming on either hand.
Now up they go ding, then down again dong,
And awhile they ring to the same old song,
For the metal goes round at a single bound,
A-cutting the fields with its measured sound,
While the tired tongue falls with a lengthened boom
As solemn and loud as the crack of doom. ”

“ Through your defiles windeth the way to heaven;
And yonder still, in spite of history's page,
Linger the golden and the silver age;
Upon the laboring gale
The news of future centuries is brought,
And of new dynasties of thought,
From your remotest vale.
⁠But special I remember thee,
Wachusett, who like me
Standest alone without society. ”

“ THE ATLANTIDES
'The Friend is some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific Seas.'—The Week.
The smothered streams of love, which flow
More bright than Phlegethon, more low,
Island us ever, like the sea,
In an Atlantic mystery. ”

“ Perhaps what Thoreau said of Quarles, one of that school of gnomic poets of which he was a student, might be aptly applied to himself: ‘It is rare to find one who was so much of a poet and so little of an artist. Hopelessly quaint, he never doubts his genius; it is only he and his God in all the world. He uses language sometimes as greatly as Shakespeare; and though there is not much straight grain in him, there is plenty of rough, crooked timber.’ The affinity of Thoreau’s style to that of Herbert, Donne, Cowley, and other minor Elizabethans, has often been remarked ”

“ While the relentless shade draws on its veil,
For some sure shelter from approaching dews,
And the insidious step of nightly foes.
I fear imprisonment has dulled thy wit,
Or ingrained servitude extinguished it—
But no—dim memory of the days of yore,
By Brahmapootra and the Jumna's shore,
Where thy proud race flew swiftly o'er the heath,
And sought its food the jungle's shade beneath,
Has taught thy wings to seek yon friendly trees,
As erst by Indus' bank and far Ganges. ”

“ The title of poet could hardly be withheld from the author of such truly powerful pieces as ‘The Fall of the Leaf,’ ‘Winter Memories,’ ‘Smoke in Winter,’ or ‘Inspiration.’
Nor should it be forgotten that Thoreau was always regarded as a poet by those who were associated with him. ‘Poet-Naturalist’ was the suggestive title which Ellery Channing applied to him; and Hawthorne remarked that ‘his thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse, as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in them.’ Even Emerson’s final estimate was far from unappreciative. ”

“ Through his discourse I climb and see
⁠As from some eastern hill,
A brighter morrow rise to me
⁠Than lieth in her skill.
As 'twere two summer days in one,
⁠Two Sundays come together,
Our rays united make one sun,
⁠With fairest summer weather. ”

“ What bird wilt thou employ
⁠To bring me word of thee?
For it would give them joy—
⁠'Twould give them liberty—
To serve their former lord
⁠With wing and minstrelsy.
A sadder strain mixed with their song,
⁠They 've slowlier built their nests;
Since thou art gone
⁠Their lively labor rests. ”

“ Her very current e'en is hid,
As deepest souls do calmest rest,
When thoughts are swelling in the breast,
And she that in the summer's drought
Doth make a rippling and a rout,
Sleeps from Nahshawtuck to the Cliff,
Unruffled by a single skiff. ”

“ As that same meadow-mouse doth lie
⁠Snug in that last year's heath.
And if perchance the chicadee
⁠Lisp a faint note anon,
The snow is summer's canopy,
⁠Which she herself put on.
Fair blossoms deck the cheerful trees,
⁠And dazzling fruits depend ”

“ For I'd rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care:
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city's year forlorn. ”

“ Yet shines serenely on
With an eternal day,
Alike when they are gone,
And when they stay.
Implacable is Love,—
Foes may be bought or teased
From their hostile intent,
But he goes unappeased
Who is on kindness bent. ”

“ Which shows where life's true kernel 's laid,
⁠Its wheat's fine flour, and its undying force.
She with one breath attunes the spheres,
⁠And also my poor human heart,
With one impulse propels the years
⁠Around, and gives my throbbing pulse its start. ”

“ It matters not how smooth the breeze,
How shallow or how deep the seas,
Whether she bears Manilla twine,
Or in her hold Madeira wine,
Or China teas, or Spanish hides,
In port or quarantine she rides ”

“ Pilgrims pass by
⁠Toward other climes?
With shining faces,
⁠Youthful and strong,
Mounting this hill
⁠With speech and with song?'
'Ah, my good sir,
⁠I know not those ways:
Little my knowledge,
⁠Tho' many my days. ”

“ Woof of the sun, [1] ethereal gauze,
Woven of Nature's richest stuffs,
Visible heat, air-water, and dry sea,
Last conquest of the eye;
Toil of the day displayed, sun-dust,
Aerial surf upon the shores of earth,
Ethereal estuary, frith of light,
Breakers of air, billows of heat,
Fine summer spray on inland seas ”

“ This true people took the stranger,
And warm-hearted housed the ranger;
They received their roving guest,
And have fed him with the best;
Whatsoe'er the land afforded
To the stranger's wish accorded ”

“ If metrical skill be insisted on as an indispensable condition of poetry, he can hardly be ranked among the poets; nor, where this criterion was dominant, was it surprising that, as one of his contemporaries tells us, [3] with reference to his verses in The Dial, ‘an unquenchable laughter, like that of the gods at Vulca{xvi}n’s limping, went up over his ragged and halting lines.’ But in the appreciation of poetry there is a good deal more to be considered than this ”

“ SIC VITA [1]
'It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself.'—The Week. ”

“ Most of Thoreau’s poems were composed early in his life, before his twenty-sixth year, ‘Just now’ he wrote in the autumn of 1841, ‘I am in the mid-sea of verses, and they actually rustle round me, as the leaves would round the head of Autumnus himself, should he thrust it{xii} up through some vales which I know ”

“ It is, therefore, almost an injustice to treat them separately at all.’ [2] After the discontinuance of The Dial, Thoreau ceased to publish his verses as separate poems, but interpolated them, in the manner described, in his prose essays, where they form a sort of accompaniment to the thought, and from which it is in many cases impossible to detach them. ”

“ This loss was regretted by Thoreau in after years, when the poetical habit had left him, for he fancied that some of the verses were better than his friend had supposed. But Emerson, who seldom changed his mind, adhered to his verdict, and while praising some of the poems highly, perhaps extravagantly, would admit but a small number of them to the slight selection which he appended to the posthumous edition of Thoreau’s Letters, edited by him in 1865 ”

“ Poor knights they are which bravely wait
⁠The charge of Winter's cavalry,
Keeping a simple Roman state,
⁠Discumbered of their Persian luxury.
↑ The first four of these stanzas (unnamed by Thoreau) were published in the Boston Commonwealth in 1863, under the title of 'The Soul's Season,' the remainder as 'The Fall of the Leaf.' There can be little doubt that they are parts of one complete poem. ”

“ The middle sea contains no crimson dulse,
⁠Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view;
Along the shore my hand is on its pulse,
⁠And I converse with many a shipwrecked crew.
↑ The above title, prefixed to these stanzas in Emerson's selection, is scarcely suited to so personal and characteristic a poem. ”

“ The life that I aspire to live,
⁠No man proposeth me;
No trade upon the street [2]
⁠Wears its emblazonry.
↑ First printed in full in the Boston Commonwealth, October 30, 1863. The last fourteen lines had appeared in the Dial under the title of 'The Black Knight,' and are so reprinted in the Riverside Edition. ”

“ INTRODUCTION The fifty poems here brought together under the title ‘Poems of Nature’ are perhaps two-thirds of those which Thoreau preserved. Many of them were printed by him, in whole or in part, among his early contributions to Emerson’s Dial, or in his own two volumes, The Week and Walden, which were all that were issued in his lifetime. Others were given to Mr. Sanborn for publication, by Sophia Thoreau, the year after her brother’s death (several appeared in the Boston Commonwealth in 1863) ”