By Aryeh Finklestein, historian, reviewer, translator and poet.
He is currently completing a book on the history of the Grave of
British Soldiers at the North Bridge. He lives in Newton,
Massachusetts. These lines were composed at the site of Henry David Thoreau's
cabin at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.
October
Oh Henry you know
Well the sweet
Pang that smites in
All ages and states.
Which even a gentle
Brother's love cannot
Assuage. In swirling snows
You warmed yourself
Here plied oars again
Seeing nothing but she
And the requiting sky.
Glorious in death russet
Leaves rain down noiselessly.
Above invisible geese
Call drowning the
Thud of occasional
Acorns. In this Eden
Thoughts of her
Come easily
To mind.
Flame
Did you know,
Angel at his back,
That on the Last Day
Every note was sung for you?
Seraph all ablaze!
Magnificent and tender,
Like the red sun that
Sets on fiery woods
In Walden.
Visitation
Uninvited I stand at your open
Hearth. The squirrel stares from a branch charred
By lightning. I touch your
Table and bed and chair.
Finches remembering flit through the house mindful
Of windows. Here is the
Step you sat on one day
From dawn to dusk. I grew in those seasons
like corn in the night
A door closes behind me.
No longer distinct I walk down your beaten
Track to the pond-side.
I left the woods on
September 6th 1847 for as good a reason as I went there
While thin trees lean
 Towards the rushes and
The rushes towards the tide.
Notes
October
Thoreau fell in love with Ellen Sewall when she visited Concord in 1839. Her eleven year-old
brother, Edmund, attended the school run by Henry and John Thoreau. Henry had a special affection for Edmund, whom he called "a gentle boy" in an early poem, Sympathy. Both Henry and John proposed to Ellen, but she married neither brother.
Thoreau records in his JOURNAL an outing on the Concord River with Ellen: "The other day I rowed in my boat a free, lovely young lady; and as she sat in the stern, there was nothing but she between me and the sky."
Flame
Of Dante; The Passion; of the Red Angel who appeared on the Day of Judgment. Of the Fall.
(Only when the poem was finished, did I realize that the penultimate line might refer subliminally to an incident which has long embarrassed those who see Thoreau as an early champion of Conservation. In 1844, Henry and a friend accidentally set fire to more than a hundred acres of the Walden Woods! The Concord newspaper described the "unfortunate" conflagration as "having been kindled thoughtlessly...by two men...preparing chowder in a pine stump.")
Visitation
Three years after the death of his brother, John, Henry came to live for two famous years on the banks of Walden Pond. The site of the original cabin was discovered in 1945 - a century after Thoreau began his legendary sojourn in the woods - by Lincoln archeologist, Roland Robbins. The latter had been encouraged to search for the site by Concord historian, Allen French.
Poems: ©2000
Aryeh Finklestein
Backgrounds: Culprit Fey.
Bar: Classic Themes.
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