Walden and on the Duty of Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau

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Inspired by Walden

Many poets, philosophers, and political scientists have looked to Henry David Thoreau’s naturalism for inspiration. The two poems below, in particular, reflect Thoreau’s commitment to a life of simplicity.

A student and longtime friend of Thoreau, the American writer Louisa May Alcott wrote “Thoreau’s Flute” as an elegy shortly after his death in 1862.

We, sighing, said, “Our Pan is dead;
His pipe hangs mute beside the river;
Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
But Music’s airy voice is fled.
Spring mourns as for untimely frost;
The bluebird chants a requiem;
The willow-blossom waits for him;—
The Genius of the wood is lost.”

Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
There came a low, harmonious breath:
“For such as he there is no death;
His life the eternal life commands;
Above man’s aims his nature rose:
The wisdom of a just content
Made one small spot a continent,
And turned to poetry Life’s prose.

“Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
Swallow and aster, lake and pine,
To him grew human or divine,—
Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
Such homage Nature ne’er forgets,
And yearly on the coverlid

’Neath which her darling lieth hid
Will write his name in violets.

“To him no vain regrets belong,
Whose soul, that finer instrument,
Gave to the world no poor lament,
But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
O lonely friend! he still will be
A potent presence, though unseen,—
Steadfast, sagacious, and serene:
Seek not for him,—he is with thee.”

In his autobiography The Trembling of the Veil (1922), Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats said this about his poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1892), which was inspired by Thoreau: “Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem ‘Innisfree,’ my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.” Here is the poem:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

More recently, in Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), the naturalist Roderick Nash explored a distinctly American wilderness sensibility that finds its deepest roots in Thoreau’s writings. Thoreau’s influence can be found in writers such as John Burroughs, John Muir, Mary Austin, John C. Van Dyke, and Henry Beston. More recent writers, including Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, and William Least Heat-Moon, have furthered this sensibility and strengthened and extended Thoreau’s legacy.

The idyllic and environmental combine with the scientific in psychologist B. F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two (1948). Skinner was one of the leading exponents of the behavioralist approach to psychology, and his virtually plotless novel is a demonstration of his psychological theories in practice. The “Walden Two” of the book’s title is a fictional commune in which social problems are solved by scientific management practices based on Skinner’s unique understanding of human conduct. Of course, we will never know what Thoreau—by no means a friend of highly organized social environments—would have to say about Skinner’s novel. However, by invoking Walden, as both a place and an idea, Skinner demonstrates the enduring pull of Thoreau’s philosophy. And Skinner’s eponymous commune has itself inspired many of Thoreau’s less solitary disciples to establish their own cooperatives based on their desire to live deliberately.

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