- 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
Knighting Elms
Knighting Elms
- Chapter:
- (p.132) (p.133) 7 Knighting Elms
- Source:
- Thoreau and the Language of Trees
- Author(s):
Richard Higgins
Richard Higgins
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
Thoreau’s love of trees led him to romanticize them and to invest them with noble qualities he thought society lacked. As Concord’s rural character began to fade, Thoreau used trees as symbols of a simpler, more heroic past. When the Davis Elm, a huge, century-old, landmark elm in Concord, was suddenly felled in 1856, Thoreau angrily delivered a mock eulogy. He made the tree a symbol of the town.He said a kingpost of the town had been cut down. He cast the Davis Elm and all of Concord’s elms as beacons of moral principle—and he depicted them as “citizens” of the town who discharge their duties more faithfully than its people.
Keywords: John Evelyn, romanticize, metaphor, Davis Elm, elm, elms, noble, Concord’s, Concord’s elms, symbols, heroic, landmark, felled, 1856, eulogy, kingpost, cut down, beacons, moral principles, citizens
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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