Henry David Thoreau
The naturalist — The transcendentalist — The philosopher
By: Abbigail D. Thelen
INTRO AND THESIS
During the United States infancy, its citizens were still reliant on Europe for trade, religious practices, and upon their government and churches for how they should think and feel. Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and, the subject of this essay, Henry David Thoreau brought a new world view to the table. The Transcendentalist movement encouraged American citizens then, and in the future, to trust their intuition, to seek knowledge from the world around them, and pursue social and government reforms.
In Thoreau’s fifty-five years on Earth, he encouraged others to simplify their lives, to take care of the nature around them, to trust their own intuition, and to stand up for what they believed in. Along with being regarded as an inspirational nature writer, and a major contributor to the Transcendentalist movement, the ideas he expressed in Walden (and Thoreau’s other works) were an inspiration for future reform movements in America such as the Civil Rights Act.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Henry David Thoreau lived in Concord Massachusetts from his birth in July of 1817 to his death in 1862. He grew up in a peaceful era just after the end of the War of 1812. Concord was also the starting ground for the American Transcendentalist movement, of which Thoreau would become a major influence. Despite his family’s financial troubles, Thoreau received a robust education, learning from classics of the time including the works of Homer, Euripides, Voltaire, Molière, and Racine (Sanna, par. 33). He was taught a variety of natural sciences including Earth sciences, biology, information known in astronomy at the time, as well as mathematics, philosophy and history (Sanna, par. 33). Evidently, he was a Harvard graduate. His family would make various camping trips throughout his youth to sites like Walden Pond, Assabet River, and Fairhaven. He also learned a bit from the Native Americans who would occasionally make camp near Concord (Wayne, par. 2).
He was a good friend of fellow transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson who happened to own an estate situated on Walden Pond. Armed with the knowledge from his robust education, his frequent camping trips with his family, and the knowledge from native Americans near Concord, he set upon his personal two-year experiment of life on Walden Pond. During this time, he wrote Walden, a diary and manifesto of sorts, which included his innermost ruminations about life and research that he had conducted while living on Walden Pond. He even took soundings of it’s depths in the winter, while the pond was still iced over, using a compass, rope, and stone and recorded the depth findings, including it in chapter “The Pond in Winter” of Walden, finding that contrary to popular opinion in the two it was not actually bottomless.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Walden was written during Thoreau’s life-experiment on Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847 but would not be published until 1854 (Wayne, par. 4). The book is separated into eighteen chapters, which appear to move through the four seasons. In it, he seems to be pleading with his audience to embark on a simpler life and appreciate the wonders of nature. Paul Grant puts it well in his paper “Nature in Walden”, “Thoreau perceived of nature as more than just a series of picturesque landscapes: He saw it as an artistic model, as a source of sustenance, as a moral teacher, and as a manifestation of divinity.” To illustrate these concepts to the reader, he uses literary devices such as metaphor, personification, allusions, and satire.
First, starting with the theme of leading a simpler life, Thoreau writes in Walden, “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.” Thoreau spent his days maintaining his bean farm in the morning, for a little compensation, and then used the rest of his day to explore the nature surrounding his home on Walden Pond and contemplate life’s complexities. In his mind, men made their lives more complex than they had to while in the pursuit of luxuries. To demonstrate this, he alludes to Darwin’s observations of men sitting near a fire in Tierra del Fuego, illustrating that the explorers, well insulated by their coats, from Europe were barely warm next to the fire, while the sparsely clothed natives of the island sitting further were roasting from a distance. He then attaches this analogy to men seeking luxurious things, implying that they “cook” themselves by acquiring too much sometimes leading to their downfall, or that some men in the pursuit of more than the necessary warmth trade their valuable time and happiness for something that won’t bring them more time or happiness. He believed that pursuing material things was pointless and that to live as simply as possible, seeking only what was necessary, especially since only the very fortunate few would get to reap those benefits. “Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them” (Thoreau). Allusion and metaphor are common vehicles Thoreau uses to get his message across.
For Thoreau, nature was not only a practical medium upon which he could live life, it was also a source of immeasurable information and spiritual divinity from which he could draw (Grant, par. 1). By listening and watching nature play around him he could tap into what he felt God wanted him to know. To express this conversation with nature in Walden, Thoreau personifies it, giving Nature human-like and divine qualities, often capitalizing the “N” in nature (Grant, par. 6). In chapter “The Ponds”, Thoreau states, “I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to have charmed”. He had noticed the perch and felt that it was as equally interested in him as he was it. In this quote Thoreau give nature the quality of “friendliness” by explaining how the sounds and atmosphere make him feel during a light rain, “… an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantage of human neighborhood insignificant.” A more on the nose example of this personification comes in the conclusion of the piece when Thoreau states, “The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou.” Here he gives wild geese the characteristics of a flashy individual who seeks luxury through travel, though in an albeit humorous way.
Thoreau is also a frequenter of satire and comedy. For example, in the story described above of the rich cooking themselves he uses the term, “a-la-mode” to describe the fancy way in which such a luxurious individual would probably like to be cooked. When describing how one could explore the world and seek something from it he says, “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar,” continuing on to say that if there is nothing better to look for then it would be a good practice of sorts for the real searching to be done in life.
As you can see Thoreau relies a lot on his personal accounts of nature, his personal experiences in life, and the education he got as a boy. His themes included self-reliance, nature, minimalism, and environmentalism. To promote these messages he used metaphor, allusion, personification, and satire.
LEGACY
As described above, Thoreau used nature metaphors, allusions, and personification. His use of personification makes you feel like a part of the story and gives a new life to the Nature in which we live. For this reason, he became a great influence for future American nature writers such as John Burroughs and John Muir (Lowne, “Legacy of Henry David Thoreau” par. 2). It is no surprise that his writings encourage those who seek to protect that Nature. Continuously throughout Walden he implores the reader to simplify, providing what he feels are just reasons to do so which include bettering one’s financial situation, giving them their time back that they would otherwise be spending trying to afford frivolous things, and using only what is needed from nature to survive. For example, his cabin and tool shed were made almost entirely from items unused in town. He only spent as much time as was needed on his bean farm to make a living, spending the rest of his time on rumination and traveling the grounds of his hometown. Lowne also attributes Thoreau’s Walden as a great influence on the missions undertaken by conservationists and regional planners Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford. (“Legacy of Henry David Thoreau” par. 2)
Thoreau took part in meetings at the Transcendental Club publishing poems and other written works in the club’s magazine, the Dial (Sanna, par. 85). In addition to these writings, Walden contributed greatly to the American Transcendentalist movement, which in Lowne’s article “Walden: Essays by Thoreau” was a movement which, “represented a battle between the younger and older generations and the emergence of a new national culture based on native materials.” His writings encouraged newer generations to think for themselves, challenge long held conventions, and seek a relationship with God through the natural world. Thoreau repeatedly states that he learns much about morals and the world around him from watching nature at work in Walden. There are moments in the writing where he seems to be having a direct conversation with the reader imploring them to continue their own private journey of growth because, “… if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” To Thoreau there was no greater task and no greater reward than being confident in oneself and actions. To be self-reliant and seek answers for oneself was the epitome of life, a key characteristic of the American Transcendentalist movement.
Jocelyn Freedmen’s news article titled “Drew Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Martin Luther King Jr. Speaks at Drew” attributes Thoreau as an inspiration to Martin Luther King who spent eight days in jail when he refused to cease his marches for the civil rights of African Americans. (par. 4) Thoreau himself had spent a night in jail when he refused to pay his taxes which would have funded the imperialization of Mexico and in protest against slavery (Sanna, pars. 138–144). King also uses some of the themes from Thoreau’s other major work Resistance to Civil Government in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. He also used Thoreau’s writing, and that of Ghandi, to form a strategy for his civil rights movement (Reeder, 14). Wayne seconds this in her article “Thoreau Henry David” by adding Ghandi and Tolstoy as those influenced by his themes in both Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. So, not only was Thoreau influential to the Transcendentalist movement, which changed America, he also influenced future movement leaders, like King, which contributed to the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
WORKS CITED
Freeman, Jocelyn. “Drew Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Martin Luther King Jr. Speaks at Drew.” Acorn, The: Drew University (Madison, NJ), sec. news, 3 Feb. 2023. NewsBank: America’s News, https://infoweb-newsbank-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/apps/news/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info%3Asid/infoweb-newsbank-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net&svc_dat=NewsBank&req_dat=A9D2A8145CCA4A768A2E7F0F4219EDB0&rft_val_format=info%3Aofi/fmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Actx&rft_dat=document_id%3Anews/18F7415E63692F80. Accessed 30 Mar. 2023.
Grant, Paul Benedict. “Nature in Walden.” Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature, Facts On File, 2020. Bloom’s Literature, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=95547&itemid=WE54&articleId=39638. Accessed 30 Mar. 2023.
Lowne, Cathy. “Walden: Essays by Thoreau”. Britannica. 2023 February 22. https://www.britannica.com/place/Walden-Pond Accessed 29 Mar. 2023
Reeder, James. “Two Views of Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr”. Morehead State University. June 1970. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1295&context=msu_theses_dissertations. Accessed 29 Mar. 2023
Sanna, Ellyn. “Thoreau, Henry David.” Henry David Thoreau, Chelsea House, 2003. Bloom’s Literature, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=95547&itemid=WE54&articleId=1528. Accessed 30 Mar. 2023
Thoreau, Henry David. “Walden”. Released 1995 January. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm. Accessed 25 Mar. 2023
Wayne, Tiffany K. “Thoreau, Henry David.” Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, Facts On File, 2006. Bloom’s Literature, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=95547&itemid=WE54&articleId=39924. Accessed 30 Mar. 2023.
