CHAPTER 31

Thoreau and Poetry (1972)

Thoreau, whom we come to honor, speaks to us today.1 You have been hearing, seeing the traces of Thoreau in our own time. I imagine much of what I am going to say to you may be recapitulation. But I want to recapitulate for you, from this place where I stand, the effort of a person, in conscious life, to make something that can flash again and again with an integral moment in its flashing. Thoreau speaks to us of the great difficulty of our own lives to pull themselves into that integrity, speaks in that flash of reality, which is the present moment always, which is now, which is the only real, and of which Thoreau was deeply conscious.

I do not know how you have been hearing about him. You have heard from people whose lives are deep in his work and life. Professor Harding, whose work one must know to find this, is here, and Mr. Feinberg, whose work has helped to make this possible, and Carl Bode, who made the poems available and remade the edition of the poems.2 Many people, many people living and dead—I think of Matthiessen, whom I knew and who reached Thoreau from where he lived in a way that comes into this deeply.3 The process goes back; it goes back to Thoreau’s own recognition of the young Whitman. He came not only to the poems but to Brooklyn; he came here—he speaks of the beach at Rockaway—he lived at Staten Island; he came to Emerson: “The American Scholar” was the address that he heard while he was still at college.4 And before that, we reach what he reached—the people he reached and their work. I name Goethe, Coleridge, Thomas Browne, because it is these currents that make the process. And it is not simple; it is not a man walking in the woods, as we say “a man walking in the woods.” Because every word of Thoreau’s would have to be gone to, and gone to according to your own life, according to the difficulties, the parts of one’s self that one dislikes, the parts of one’s self that won’t fit in with all the rest, except with extraordinary and skilled, disciplined, wild effort. Because he was aware, he treated openly the difficulties that he had, the difficulties that are open to us all, in his illness—that is, T.B.5 How to live with it? The difficulty in facing his own body, which he felt awkward with; the difficulty visible in even a drawing of Thoreau. You can see a lot of it.

There are discrepancies. These are his materials. There are discrepancies in what I have to deal with, with you today, in the way the poems are and in what he believed poetry must be. A lot of this does not “match”; and it is a fact of the not matching which is of value to us, and is deep in this curious man who was like us in that he didn’t “match.”

How to live with that; how to make a life in this world!

I want to come to “in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”6 You can’t come to that without his saying the suburban, very suburban remark that we all know: “I wish my neighbors were wilder,” he said.7 It’s that he didn’t have enough of it in himself—he wanted it. He didn’t have it in his country—he wanted it. It is the wish, it is the desire, that doesn’t match what one sees, this desire of which he is the great artist and saint. And if this leads to the life at Walden, if this leads to civil disobedience, if this leads to the poems, to poetry, if this leads to pieces of a book with titles like “Economy,” “Solitude,” “Walking,” what is this, what does it say to us?8

It is not the hermit saint, unified, integrated, finding regularity of verse, making the best pencils that anybody could make at that time, living in friendship with Emerson, living in love so that they are twin stars, no longer planets.9 It is the man frustrated in friendship, irritating beyond belief; frustrated in love, both his brother and himself turned down by the woman they loved.10 In love with his own people who were, finally, in Civil War, the culmination of the struggle during his lifetime and long before.

He faces the moment with everything that does not match, that does not fit, and sees this meeting as the potential.

This potential has to be dealt with if one is dealing with reality.

Thoreau wanted to deal with reality. More than walking on the earth and mud and muck, although he would have that; he said he must have that. He said he would find the reality, the rocks, underneath so that you could say, “This is it,” of the reality you found.

I want to come to him through poems, and even the people who speak most fully and with most understanding about his poems are likely to say something disparaging in the next moment. Even the people who believe they love his poems will say something that pulls most of it back right after and will take you to his prose. I say there is a huge distinction, even in the rhythms—the rhythms of the prose, say, are wilder than the rhythms of the poems, which are, if you will excuse me, suburban in relation to the forest of the prose. Emerson said that these poems were the best poems to come out of our American forest.11 But they come out of many things. They come out of the pressure on Thoreau to be a pastoral poet. This was a pastoral strip made in the attempt to make a civilized strip of America. He was reaching for something beyond him as we reach for something beyond us. And it is that that did the work on him; it is that kind of poet that he is. He will say what he loves in prose, and it’s a curious sort of person whom he loves, and he says this of his maxims, “They are not philosophy, but poetry.”12 This is not Goethe; this is not Coleridge; this is Raleigh, Sir Walter Raleigh, and this is one of the ways in which I come to Thoreau.13

Raleigh longed for the New World. Raleigh! How could Thoreau have anything in common with Raleigh, a marvelous silver and crimson man, the man whose arrogance is deep of his downfall; with the pearls in his ears; with the fortune spent on his clothing; with a fortune thrown away as a gesture that every child knows as a story—he threw his cloak down before Queen Elizabeth when she came to a plashy place. Raleigh was a seagoing boy, a west-country boy. His family were Grenvilles and Gilberts.14 He wanted the New World. He wanted these unknown forests, the unknown shores. “Rockaway,” says Thoreau. We know Rockaway.15 It is something quite different by now. It is the coast of the New World, stretching beyond a possible Northwest Passage, stretching beyond the people—unknown people. Red men—what’s that? Infinite riches—what’s that? Wildness—what’s that?

Raleigh never got there. Raleigh was not allowed to leave. Queen Elizabeth would not let him leave. She kept him as Captain of the Guard, all sparkling, outside the court chamber. But young Hariot is how I come to Raleigh, young Thomas Hariot, a scientist, the kind of scientist that we have not even imagined yet, because we say men are specialized; a man makes pencils—all right, he is a pencil-maker; a man lives by the side of water, whether it is a pond or the sea—all right, he is a fisherman. Now Hariot was one of the people who had not specialized. Hariot was the young scientist who was the explorer who did come here. It is as if we had trained one of our astronauts, one of our poets, one of our scientists, that is, to be an astronaut, to go to the moon, to go wherever, and to write the report—chart it—write whatever it is, tell us.16 Not describe—we call it describe—not describe. Give us an experience so that we have an experience that lets us understand what it feels like to be a man thinking these things.17

Raleigh sent the expedition out—this was 1585, it is over three hundred years before Thoreau was doing all this—and Raleigh stayed in England. But Raleigh, in what he wrote, in what he caused people to do, speaks to Thoreau. Thoreau says of the Raleigh writing—I think I can say it without having it before me—says, “It is a branch of greenness laid across the page. It is as if a green bough were laid across the page.”18

And Raleigh, this man so outwardly different, with so many complexities in his nature, with that pride, with that ability to incorporate his body into his thinking, spoke to Thoreau and formed many of the wild and fresh and difficult ideas of a new world so that Thoreau will say of the difficulties, of the things one reaches for (and this is when he is writing about Raleigh), “What is Truth? That which we know not. What is Beauty? That which we see not. What is Heroism? That which we are not.”19

It is that kind of man who is able to deal with the unknown, with that which he is not, as part of himself. This is how one climbs. This is how Thoreau climbed. This is how we come to what he wanted poems to be. There are two distinct things here, and he allows for both: what he wants them to be and what he makes.

This is what he says he wants poems to be (he is speaking of Raleigh’s poems): “They are in some respects more trustworthy testimonials to his character than state papers or tradition; for poetry is a piece of very private history, which unostentatiously lets us into the secret of a man’s life, and is to the reader what the eye is to the beholder, the characteristic feature which cannot be distorted or made to deceive.”20 We are told this about the camera, “which cannot be distorted or made to deceive,” and we all know pictures, we all know snapshots, movies. We know what the camera cannot do. But this is the eye, and this is poetry. It is a way that poetry is not spoken of very often, “the characteristic feature which cannot be distorted or made to deceive. Poetry is always impartial and unbiased evidence. The whole life of a man may safely be referred to a few deep experiences.”21 It is in this way that Thoreau speaks to us.

Is that true? Is that true for you? That the whole of your life can “be referred to a few deep experiences”? Thoreau doesn’t use the word “safely” very often. He is not interested in safety except in this line just quoted. But safely, surely! Think of your main “deep experiences.” They are the expressive things. Even if you think of them as “happening to” you, they are the ways in which you have expressed yourself. That is what Thoreau gives us in his view of poetry and in his poems—a momentary flash in which, if a man prepares for it, a life can be expressed to other lives.

Now he does not say, although we know from his life and what he has written and his way of living, he does not speak very much of the discipline that goes into it. He speaks of it obliquely . . . not obliquely at all, perfectly straight to it. He will tell us, detail by detail, of what he has observed—that is, what has acted on him. He will say what he cannot tolerate in the society around him, and what he is willing to do to place his body and his life at the situations he cannot tolerate.

His poems can be taken as evidence of this. I would like to quote a few of these poems to you.

“I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied,” we are given as the title of this.22 It is the first line of the poem. These poems have all been taken from among the prose—most of them—jottings, and they should be read that way, because this is a life in writing in which the relationship between prose and poetry is acknowledged openly, always:

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied

By a chance bond together,

Dangling this way and that, their links

Were made so loose and wide,

Methinks,

For milder weather.23

The next poem is called “The Thaw”:

I saw the civil sun drying earth’s tears,

Her tears of joy, that only faster flowed.

Fain would I stretch me by the highway-side,

To thaw and trickle with the melting snow,

That, mingled soul and body with the tide,

I too may through the pores of nature flow.

But I, alas, nor trickle can nor fume,

One jot to forward the great work of Time,

’T is mine to hearken while these ply the loom,

So shall my silence with their music chime.24

And with the sorrows and discrepancy that goes into those comes also a man’s own idea of hell. This is Thoreau:

No earnest work that will expand the frame,

And give a soundness to the muscles too?

How ye do waste your time!25

Two more. This is called “Loves Invalides”. . . This is the other side. These are the other sides, if you like, of Thoreau, the things—the material—out of which he made, finally, his simplicities:

Loves invalides are not those of common wars

More than its scars—

They are not disabled for a higher love

But taught to look above.26

And this is a very short one called “I Was Made Erect and Lone”:

I was made erect and lone,

And within me is the bone.

Still my vision will be clear,

Still my life will not be drear.

To the center all is near.

Where I sit there is my throne;

If age choose to sit apart,

If age choose, give me the start;

Take the sap and leave the heart.27

He said in his journal on March 25th, a Friday, 1842: “Great persons are not soon learned, not even their outlines, but they change like the mountains in the horizon as we ride along.”28 His greatness comes reflected to us from what he did and what he thought. We have this evidence: he spoke for one’s body and one’s thoughts, what one writes, one’s thoughts or what one lives out in action. This action, as you know, became the great river of disobedience as a means to front the other in life, the other in society.

Disobedience is of course only a negative way of putting it. The positive way is the fronting: the fronting of life, with hostility reduced all the way down, since one knows what hostility makes in another person. One knows what kind of animal one is and how one responds to hostility. One knows what it whips up in oneself.

I know it is only the violent person who understands nonviolence—who has to wake up every morning and be nonviolent for one more day.29 It is only the person who knows what it is to be irritating, to be hostile, who knows what the long physical battle is to put down—not put down, but to deal with hostility in oneself, to use all the parts of it which are usable, because there are ways to use war in oneself.

One can make art of this. This is one of the ways of art, to use the warlike, to use the ways of active struggle. It can be shown; it can be given to other people; it can be given in art.

But in the hostilities, in such a war as Vietnam in which the imagination has not yet been released to solve it—it is a political action like the political actions of which Thoreau wrote.

We have the qualities in ourselves to deal with political struggle. The ways which are taken as being hysterical, which are the civilized ways of dealing with political struggle, such as demonstration, speaking, putting your life where your opinions are—these are taken as hysterical and childlike. It is perfectly apparent what is hysterical and childlike. Not childlike, because it is not what children do. It is what wild hostility in oneself does, undealt with, not met with the imagination as Thoreau insisted on meeting it. And simply not paying a tax, walking into jail, is one of the ways to deal with it, so that one prepares oneself for jail. As the California poet Marie Welch said, we would be better off if we did our work improving the conditions of jails, because many of us may go there.30

Thoreau saw the life of a poet as part of these ways of responding. And those of you who are students know it in yourselves. You are told always that your student time is a preparing for life—to be something else, to live in some other way. We know the ways of the phases of life, and how in each phase of a man’s life he becomes something different. In nature, in a way, as ice, in nature, becomes water—becomes steam, and is all one’s life. Thoreau will laugh at some of the preparations. And you know how many times in life you have been told to hold still; don’t let your real feelings come into this—you are preparing for another part of life. Thoreau says, “This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.”31

Here is another poem—I read you poems; Thoreau wrote poems, and he said that the real poem is what the poet himself has become. Now, he would argue the other way, too, and say, when you have the poem you don’t need the biography. He will give you both sides; he will give you all the discrepancies. But he has said, among the discrepancies, the real poem is what the poet himself has become.

This poem was written and then lengthened. I am going to present it to you in its shorter form, which I love. It is the poem called “Wachusett.” This is as it is in the journals:

But special I remember thee,

Wachusett, who like me

Standest alone without society.

Thy far blue eye,

A remnant of the sky,

Seen through the clearing or the gorge,

Or from the windows of the forge,

Doth leaven all it passes by.

Nothing is true

But stands ’tween me and you,

Thou western pioneer,

Who know’st not shame nor fear,

By venturous spirit driven

Under the eaves of heaven;

And canst expand thee there,

And breathe enough of air?32

And this quatrain:

I’ve searched my faculties around,

To learn why life to me was lent:

I will attend the faintest sound,

And then declare to man what God hath meant.33

And also this poem. I’d like to read the last lines first and then go back to the beginning, because the strength of what he meant deeply is in small, in seed, in these last lines:

Implacable is Love,—

Foes may be bought or teased

From their hostile intent,

But he goes unappeased

Who is on kindness bent.

It starts with its opposite, of course. It’s called, from its first line, “Let Such Pure Hate Still Underprop,” and the epigraph is “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, and Lovers”:

Let such pure hate still underprop

Our love, that we may be

Each other’s conscience,

And have our sympathy

Mainly from thence.

We’ll one another treat like gods,

And all the faith we have

In virtue and in truth, bestow

On either, and suspicion leave

To gods below.

Two solitary stars,—

Unmeasured systems far

Between us roll,

But by our conscious light we are

Determined to one pole.

What need confound the sphere,—

Love can afford to wait,

For it no hour’s too late

That witnesseth one duty’s end,

Or to another doth beginning lend.

It will subserve no use,

More than the tints of flowers,

Only the independent guest

Frequents its bowers,

Inherits its bequest.

No speech though kind has it,

But kinder silence doles

Unto its mates,

By night consoles,

By day congratulates.

What saith the tongue to tongue?

What heareth ear of ear?

By the decrees of fate

From year to year,

Does it communicate.

and now I’m jumping to the end:

There’s nothing in the world I know

That can escape from love,

For every depth it goes below,

And every height above.

It waits, as waits the sky,

Until the clouds go by,

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.34

I want to stop with these poems, but I want to leave you also with the moment that follows, “in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”35 They don’t quote that passage. They stick to the first sentence as if it were a maxim.36 But it is part of something; and to prepare for that, something else that he said in Walden: “We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”37 And then to the great statement on wildness, which comes from the man he is to the wildness which we all imagine, “in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild.”38

(Henry David Thoreau: Studies and Commentaries, 1972)