My response to Thoreau's poem "I was upon thy bank, river."

Following up on the four poems I posted yesterday, I'll begin with the one I like least: Thoreau's.

Though my opinion will no doubt incur the wrath of many, I think Thoreau is a mediocre writer. (I'm speaking here of him as a stylist, not as a thinker or a doer.) Granted, he is far better known as a prose writer than a poet, yet even his prose can be clumsy, especially when it strains toward the poetic. Here's the opening of "A Winter Walk," published in Emerson's Dial in 1843:

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feather softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves against the livelong night. The meadow mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed.

Compare this with the opening of Robert Louis Stevenson's essay "On Marriage." Stevenson was married in 1880 and died in 1894, and presumably this essay was written sometime in between.

Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence. From first to last, and in the face of smarting disillusions, we continue to expect good fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so confidently, that we judge it needless to deserve them. I think it improbable that I shall ever write like Shakespeare, conduct an army like Hannibal, or distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths of virtue; and yet I have my by-days, hope prompting, when I am very ready to believe that I shall combine all these various excellences in my own person, and go down marching to posterity with divine honors. There is nothing so monstrous but we can believe it of ourselves.

Even though Thoreau's passage is superficially more poetic (that is, it uses more descriptive language and more imagery), Stevenson's is far more grammatically and syntactically eloquent, not to mention rhetorically rhythmic. So given Thoreau's apparent disinterest in prose melody, I find his poem's descent into cantering meter somewhat alarming. Here's the poem again, so that you can see what I mean:

I was born upon thy bank, river,

          My blood flows in thy stream,

And thou meanderest forever

          At the bottom of my dream.

Nothing much goes on here, beyond a didactic disquisition upon the speaker's link to the natural world. "Meanderest" is a horrible word, but at least it is memorable. The image of the speaker's blood flowing in the stream is also memorable, but the poet takes that image no step further. As far as I can tell, the most interesting aspect of the poem is the contrast between the meter's doggerel jauntiness and the speaker's humorless pronouncement. It's an example, in short, of how a famous name can justify a piece of writing that otherwise would be forgotten.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about the poem of the four that I like best.