- Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- A Note on Sources
- Introduction
-
1 An Eye for Trees - Against the Sky a Tree has Parts
-
2 A Heart for Trees - Heartwood
-
3 A Poet’s Trees - Woodplay
-
4 A Mind for Trees - Forest Lessons
-
5 A Soul for Trees - As High a Heaven
-
6 My Emblem, The Pine - Paeans to the Pine
-
7 Knighting Elms - Death of a Concord Kingpost
-
8 A Kingdom of Primitive Oaks - Boxborough’s Ancient Oaks
-
9 Transformed by Snow - A World Made New
-
10 In a Barque of Bark - Sailing a Sea of Green
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- List of Thoreau Excerpts
- Illustration Credits
- Index
- Index
A Poet’s Trees
A Poet’s Trees
- Chapter:
- (p.50) (p.51) 3 A Poet’s Trees
- Source:
- Thoreau and the Language of Trees
- Author(s):
Richard Higgins
Richard Higgins
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
Trees stirred the muse in Thoreau. He saw them as poems themselves, “living poetry,” writ by nature on the landscape. He “browsed” his poetic imagination on them and used the forest as a source of figurative language in which to dip his pen. He said pines and maples encircled Walden Pond like “slender eye-lashes” fringing earth’s “liquid eye.” By moonlight, the shadows of trees checker the ground “like chandeliers of darkness.” The blazing fall sermons of maple trees surpass those of New England ministers. Thoreau also frequently imagined trees as the different kinds of writing—as the leaves of a book, mythic tablets, scrolls, sermons and inscriptions.
Keywords: stirred poetic, poems, living poetry, browsed, imagination, figurative, pines, maples, Walden Pond, leaves, mythic, sermons
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- A Note on Sources
- Introduction
-
1 An Eye for Trees - Against the Sky a Tree has Parts
-
2 A Heart for Trees - Heartwood
-
3 A Poet’s Trees - Woodplay
-
4 A Mind for Trees - Forest Lessons
-
5 A Soul for Trees - As High a Heaven
-
6 My Emblem, The Pine - Paeans to the Pine
-
7 Knighting Elms - Death of a Concord Kingpost
-
8 A Kingdom of Primitive Oaks - Boxborough’s Ancient Oaks
-
9 Transformed by Snow - A World Made New
-
10 In a Barque of Bark - Sailing a Sea of Green
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- List of Thoreau Excerpts
- Illustration Credits
- Index
- Index
