We proceed to Thoreau's second sentence, more obviously pun-driven
than the first: "A civilized man, using the word in the
ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length
pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres
about a crude and undissolved mass of peat."
Some "ordinary senses" of "civilized"
include: "socially developed," "humane, ethical,
and reasonable," and "refined in taste, cultured"
- foundations for the upcoming simile, "like a cultivated
plant." Civilized man is no longer a pine, a mighty
evergreen in the fullness of life[13], but is doomed to pine
(waste away in mourning) in our tamed woods, deprived of nature's
rich soil and drawing less and less sustenance from a poor clump
of peat.[14]
As transcendentalists nevertheless, we must infer that man
need not pine, but shall rather be pine (be restored
to life and immortality; become the "woodman" in the
obsolete - archetypal - sense, the supernatural wild man) if
we can only discover an extraordinary sense of the word "civilized"-
divorced from the worn-out "ideas and associations"
to which we cling - our familiar peat.
Who shall give to "civilized" this renewed, extraordinary
sense? It must be an individual out of the ordinary, someone
who is neither cultivated plant nor yet pine, having roots that
can divine "some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses,
far in the recesses of the wilderness" (p. 146).
In short, it must be the Poet in the sacred role (and obsolete
sense) of Woodman.[15] The true poet's hardiness belies his aspect
as a "fragile" flower "like the orchises, commonly
described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their
nutriment from the crudest mass of peat" (p. 156). Our
poets are not derivative versifiers who fancy themselves Sylvani,
but truly "spirits of a yet more liberal culture" than
that of the cultivated potted-plant-man. To these spirits, "no
simplicity is barren" - not the simplicity of mere peat,
for example, and not the simplicity of Life in the Woods.
We have considered an intricate poetic construct. All told,
it serves chiefly to concentrate - to reiterate in words dense
with rich images - the message already expressed at the climax
of the moose-hunt many pages earlier:
Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend
and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands
its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who
has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have
been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet; he
it is who makes the truest use of the pine, ...who loves them
as his own shadow in the air, and lets them stand. …It is
the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine,
with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal
as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to
tower above me still. (pp. 121-22.)
Precisely, the poet's calling and special skill consist in
engineering unexpected corridors of verbal mirrors, such as these
which have enlightened us, deep in the recesses of Thoreau's
wilderness. When viewed (or heard) from the right standpoint,
Thoreau's mirrors will place a given expression beside itself,
releasing it to echo across the forests and return to our ear
reversed, distorted, perhaps transcending antonymities in some
new synthesis. If you read Thoreau's two sentences aloud you
may hear, scrambled within "sylvan," an echo of that
Thoreauvian watchword, "civil."[16]
* Thoreau, The Maine Woods, ed. Joseph
J. Moldenhauer, Princeton NJ: Princeton U P, 1972, 155.
13. And bearing seeds of everlasting life:
"It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as
high a heaven, there to tower above me still" (p. 122).
14. Thoreau's image mirrors his earlier picture
of humanity "reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth
for nutriment." Now the very crust has vanished, so that
we must eat peat. (The soil in peat bogs is highly acidic and
low in nutrients.)
15. A forest-dweller but not a woodcutter,
the poet-woodman knows the right use of wood. Does he not bear
a resemblance to our poet of Life in the Woods, whose advice
to writers concludes with, "Learn to split wood, at least."
(A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Princeton
NJ: Princeton U P, 1980, 105.)
16. Thoreau's Orphic companion heard the same
echo when he pronounced Thoreau "a sylvan man accomplished
in the virtues of an aboriginal civility" (my emphases;
cf. note 6).