Thoreau in His Winter Walk

(If I wrote this post perfectly, I'd never get it done. So I hope that there are no mistakes, and that the rather random choice of picking pieces of Byron's verse to offer the contrast to Thoreau is not too bothersome!)

There are few essays that have delighted me so greatly that I will think of them again years afterward and look forward to recommending them to others — but Henry David Thoreau's "Winter Walk," an essay that describes a day after heavy snow in his New England habitat, is the rarity that lives up to this unexpected bliss. (It is not to be confused with Walking, which is a general essay about sauntering, etc.)

I don't know if philosophical meaning is the aim of the essay, aside maybe from the usual tension between nature and man that I doubt Thoreau meant to address here. (Even when the trees, birds, etc., are resting, the chimneys of his neighbours send up their flags into the air, doubtless emanating the ghosts of lumbered trees.) At the end of it, I think we might be left, too — for instance — with the illusion that a theoretical appreciation of nature is an enrichment to the world at large. In practical terms, of course, the illusion might not be easy to 'prove'; but perhaps Thoreau and his neighbours were indeed stewards rather than robber barons of their lands. Later, of course, since a few plums of morality are still dropped in the pudding of this essay in the final paragraphs; and I think in the end he has virtually adopted a kind of Socratic method whereby a dialogue between nature and man has taken place during the walk, leading to some kind of conclusion that the questioner had held all along; I will mention what 'lessons' there are in the text.

There are implicit 'themes' in Thoreau's approach: in a way Thoreau is a 'socialist' about nature-worship in this essay. Ignoring the fact that he is depicting a solitary protagonist walking, as (after all) this protagonist meets others along the way, he seems firmly convinced that any man can feel the same things on this journey. It makes no difference whether they are Transcendentalist Philosophers or street sweepers — even the pickerel-fishermen whom he depicts as numbed, physically if not mentally, by their freezing wintry sentry-posts. (In that respect he is widely different from Lord Byron's Childe Harold,* for instance, for whom the remainder of humanity seems rather an unappreciative nuisance on the face of nature. I think that other writers can — though at the moment I can't mention other examples — be aristocratic about the level of intellectual or emotional refinement needed before Nature deigns to 'reveal herself' to the observer.)

Julien Alden Weir, "The Ice Cutters"
1895; Oil on canvas; via Wikimedia Commons

WHEN walking and watching things, without external distractions (at least) and — due to the snow — left with nowhere else to be, perhaps we can evolve our own philosophies quite naturally; and Thoreau is merely here to show us the way, like a signpost. In that sense his text is undemanding. Of course it isn't strictly observation, since he describes things we wouldn't see on a walk — "The meadow mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed." — but like to imagine, anthropomorphically. (Like — to put it unpatronizingly, since after all more grown-up animal illustrations like the Capitalist Pig are also the fruits of imagination — in children's books.)

***

Of course 'Nature' is a mirror of sorts, to ourselves and our human environments, when we write about it like this. When Byron, for instance, writes of

"The fall of waters! rapid as the light
The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss;
The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,
And boil in endless torture; while the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,"

I gather that not every visitor of the waterfalls will have seen the same degree of terror in his subject; and even there, there is a contrast to Byron's own Weltanschauung (if Childe Harold is his alter ego in this aspect too) as a child. It's particularly clear at the end of Canto IV: he writes of the ocean, not a waterfall, in fearsome terms. Then he surprisingly drops in a childhood scene that in tone almost fits in Stevenson's Garden of Verses:

"And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror—'twas a pleasing fear."

Many might have looked at Thoreau's tranquil snows and unearthed or imagined a substratum of horror, benign though it might have looked to Thoreau; but it's also Thoreau's selection of nature to look at which reveals something about him as a human being.

Thoreau's watercourses are not at all like Byron's; they're malice-free metaphors of latent life and energy.

Occasionally we wade through fields of snow, under whose depths the river is lost for many rods, to appear again to the right or left, where we least expected; still holding on its way underneath, with a faint, stertorous, rumbling sound, as if, like the bear and marmot, it too had hibernated, and we had followed its faint summer trail to where it earthed itself in snow and ice. At first we should have thought that rivers would be empty and dry in midwinter, or else frozen solid till the spring thawed them; but their volume is not diminished even, for only a superficial cold bridges their surfaces. The thousand springs which feed the lakes and streams are flowing still. The issues of a few surface springs only are closed, and they go to swell the deep reservoirs. Nature's wells are below the frost. The summer brooks are not filled with snow-water, nor does the mower quench his thirst with that alone. The streams are swollen when the snow melts in the spring, because nature's work has been delayed, the water being turned into ice and snow, whose particles are less smooth and round, and do not find their level so soon.

***

While it doesn't seem like any thundering waterfalls were threshing through Walden Pond, so Thoreau wouldn't have described them anyway, I think that clearly everyone is more comfortable in some phases of nature than in others. And, if I remember correctly, Thoreau himself had little use for the cedar, spruce and fir forests of the far West.

*

At any rate, Thoreau acts like a pacesetter as well as like a 'signpost.' He renders each scene he finds or imagines so roundly before he progresses to the next, that it is practically impossible not to read the text whilst 'slowing down' a little, too. I like mentally laying excerpts of the text side by side with my early memories of waking up on a snowy day — which were special events to me particularly since they were rare in our warmer corner of Canada. In that respect, reading "The Winter Walk" is like curling into a window-seat and looking through the pane every now and then to find a sight that verifies and illustrates one's text.  This makes the reading a little longer and nicer, and furnishes time needed for things to sink in. Of course Thoreau knowingly draws the reader into his journey; he writes it in the first person plural and the present tense.

And Thoreau's neutral way of not preachingly proving anything — not even necessarily proving Thoreau's way with words or thoughtfulness, because a perceptible drip of self-regard would shatter the atmosphere like a smidgen of meltwater the surface of a pond — makes this essay an easy Philosophy to read. (Walking has a divergent aim, and a glance at it shows that it is far more filled with didacticism and literary references.) At the end of the "Winter Walk," of course, he can't resist:

In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. The imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house affords, and in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth and see the sky through the chimney-top, enjoying the quiet and serene life that may be had in a warm corner by the chimney-side, or feeling our pulse by listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the sound of the flail in distant barns all the long afternoon. No doubt a skillful physician could determine our health by observing how these simple and natural sounds affected us. We enjoy now, not an Oriental, but a Boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the shadow of motes in the sunbeams.

Perhaps, too, this essay is the pleasanter for not being about the manmade environment. Without thinking that the world is beautiful only "Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile," there is nothing in the essay that requires criticism or roused moral outrage. And that freedom from irritation is also one reason to celebrate Christmas; at least if one gives everyone else some respite from reasons to distrust human nature. — Thoreau: "Now commences the long winter evening around the farmer's hearth, when the thoughts of the indwellers travel far abroad, and men are by nature and necessity charitable and liberal to all creatures. Now is the happy resistance to cold, when the farmer reaps his reward, and thinks of his preparedness for winter, and, through the glittering panes, sees with equanimity 'the mansion of the northern bear,' for now the storm is over," [...].

At any rate, I think the inspirations here are brilliant. At the beginning, for instance: "[I]nward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship" is a Victorian-era phrase that I would be tempted to skim over. But it's merely part of a variable and either tangible or esoteric series of thoughts. And oddly enough it is coherent. Ceres, the product of the Greek Mediterranean and summery symbol of fertility, is an interesting inspiration; and in 18th-century poets I have found it terribly distracting to keep track of all the references to nymphs, hills, and hunters; but when Thoreau writes, "But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields," I am not taken out of the atmosphere at all, nor driven to a Dictionary of Mythology for footnotes. These are piffling examples, of course.

In fact the biggest 'vexation' I have had in writing about the "Winter Walk" is narrowing down the handful of quotations that I want to share. This, for example — "The recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and making tracks in the snow." It expresses exactly what everyone, I think, feels when they wake up and see the mysterious trails and traces of different animals outside. Or this lovely description of a merely half-veiled world underneath the glassy river ice:

With one impulse we are carried to the cabin of the muskrat, that earliest settler, and see him dart away under the transparent ice, like a furred fish, to his hole in the bank; and we glide rapidly over meadows where lately "the mower whet his scythe," through beds of frozen cranberries mixed with meadow-grass. 

"First Snow Along the Hudson River" (1859)
by François Régis Gignoux
via Wikimedia Commons

A warming acknowledgement in his "Winter Walk," too, is not that life still statically exists in winter; but that rather life is developing, and that there is a purpose and continuity to it:

In winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens, in their natural order and position. The meadows and forests are a hortus siccus. The leaves and grasses stand perfectly pressed by the air without screw or gum, and the birds' nests are not hung on an artificial twig, but where they builded them. We go about dry-shod to inspect the summer's work in the rank swamp, and see what a growth have got the alders, the willows, and the maples; testifying to how many warm suns, and fertilizing dews and showers. See what strides their boughs took in the luxuriant summer,—and anon these dormant buds will carry them onward and upward another span into the heavens.

Lastly, I think that the "Winter Walk" is also so charming because it renders the sense of safety that we feel in winter when we are lucky, and we are sheltered from wind, rain, snow and frost; fed and warmed. — It may be a trite thought; art and music and even commerce in the Christmas phase of winter are all adjusted to create precisely this feeling. — And still, of course, winter might be terribly lonesome and Hadean if so many other beings, human or not, weren't triumphantly doing exactly the same thing beyond our walls.

*

The surly night-wind rustles through the wood, and warns us to retrace our steps, while the sun goes down behind the thickening storm, and birds seek their roosts, and cattle their stalls.

***

Sources:
Winter Walk, in Excursions and Poems at Project Gutenberg.
Walking, also at Project Gutenberg.

1 Though every prospect pleases - Quotation from Reginald Heber's "From Greenland's Icy Mountains.", at Wikiquote
2 The fall of waters! - Quotation from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV Stanza LXIX, p. 128, from an 1886 edition at Archive.org.)
3 And I have loved thee! Quotation ibid., p. 162. Canto IV, Stanza CLXXXIV.)

All other quotations, of course, from Thoreau's Winter Walk. (Here in the volume Excursions and Poems at Project Gutenberg.)
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* "Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain." To be fair, Byron also insists, "I love not Man the less, but Nature more," when he communes with Nature.

The rest (Canto IV, Stanza 177) is — I think — partly serene and beautiful . . .

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar;

But he does depict Man as an antagonist, 'Though every prospect pleases':

Man marks the earth with ruin

(Stanza 178.)

J.E.H. MacDonald, "Morning after Snow, High Park"

Oil on canvas, 1912; via Wikimedia Commons