Today’s Poem: I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied

Henry David Thoreau wearies of his own mandate to change the world

Léon Blonvin, Still Life: Daisies and Violets, before 1866 (Wikimedia Commons)

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I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied

by Henry David Thoreau

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.

A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.

A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.

And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.

Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they’re rife.

But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life’s vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.

That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.

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Transcendentalism looks, sometimes, like not that much fun. Forced to go around asserting that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Believing that only in fleeing to the woods can you live deliberately. Torn, as E.B. White once remarked, “by two powerful and opposing drives — the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the world straight.”

Granted, this view is reductive. It’s the truth, but not the whole truth, about Henry David Thoreau (1817—1862). Often enough, despite his urge to set the world straight, Thoreau errs anyway on the side of enjoying it, with an enjoyment that becomes palpable in the flow of his prose. His 1862 essay, “Walking,” which appeared posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly, may figure the decision to take a walk as an embarkation on a “crusade . . . to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.” But it’s about walking as enjoyment, not as medicine. Enjoyment ultimately is the moral medicine, of course, but it goes down so easily with the surge of the sentences. Even if you don’t believe that there’s something intrinsically more edifying in walking west than there is in walking east, Thoreau can make you suspend that disbelief.

It’s easy to make fun of Thoreau for his earnest desire to right the world’s wrongs — but it’s also easy to forget his capacity for enjoying that world. It’s easy to forget the moments when Walden, to cite the most obvious example, pauses its impulse to be about Larger Things for which the natural serves as a metaphor, and offers instead a breath of actual air. There are those instances when “a fishhawk dimples the surface of the pond and brings up a fish,” and “the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither.” The writer’s mind stops lading things with meaning and simply apprehends them, with pleasure, as they are.

In those moments, the urge to set the world straight holds its peace. Straight or not, the world simply is, in its vivid, living particulars. In those instances, it offers itself to be enjoyed, and is taken up on the offer. As Jessie Kindig writes, “Where Emerson, with his religious beginnings, is often figurative and ‘emblematic,’ for Thoreau — bad student, good pencil-maker, striving writer, day laborer, insufferable moralist — all is tangible, all is now, that is the only divinity worth the name.”

Still, it’s not hard to imagine that, committed in principle to that “figurative” and “emblematic” Transcendentalist philosophy, but loving the natural world impulsively for itself, Thoreau might have felt like “a parcel of vain strivings tied / By a chance bond together.” Today’s Poem reads like the internal tug-of-war it describes: the setting-things-straight impulse, which wants to cast things as metaphors from which meaning might be wrung, at odds with a more basic impulse to see and name and apprehend.

Witness the shift from the abstraction of the opening stanza to the particulars in the second. From “strivings” and “links” and unreal metaphorical “weather” we move to “violets without their roots, / And sorrel intermixed,” all tied together with “a wisp of straw.” With reluctance we yank ourselves back to the level of capital-M Meaning and “the law / By which I’m fixed.” 

B.D. Maxham’s 1856 daguerreotype of Henry David Thoreau (Wikimedia Commons)

Despite the interestingly varied structure of these abcacb sestets, with their varying meter that shifts from pentameter to trimeter to tetrameter to trimeter to a single stressed syllable to dimeter, nothing else is quite so compelling as the physical details they catalog: broken-stemmed violets mixed with sorrel, damp from the woods and tied up with straw, doomed to fade, but vivid in the moment when they’re still almost alive. More than the ideas that they’re meant to represent symbolically, their vivid presence in the poem, as things in themselves, commands our attention. 

It’s not true, of course, that philosophy and poetry are binaries. It’s not true that enjoyment and metaphor-making oppose each other. That you can have meaning or you can have fun, but you can’t have both: also not true. Still, the desire to taste and see the world seems more the province of poetry than does the urge to change the world. And as this poem suggests, even its author — compelled to set the world straight — wasn’t having quite as good a time as he had hoped. 

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