Now at Sundown I hear the hooting of an owl—hoohoo hoo—hoorer—hoo … I rejoice that there are owls. They represent the stark twilight unsatisfied thoughts I have.
—Journals, November 18, 1851
Some chickadees come flitting close to me, and one utters its spring note, phe-be, for which I feel under obligations to him.
—Journals, January 9, 1858
I hear in several places the low dumping notes of awakened bullfrogs, what I call their pebbly notes, as if they were cracking pebbles in their mouths; not the plump dont dont or ker dont, but kerdle dont dont.
—Journals, May 10, 1858
When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate,” and with a sudden gush return to my senses.
—“Walking”
THE POEMS OF A DAY begin presently with sound, and they continue so. Henry David Thoreau, devoted friend of the days, wrote continually, and still the writing makes the sound of poems. Devotion is competent to every art. It pays perfect attention, and in the economy of poetry (anything written attentively is a poem, whatever else befalls), attention offers a presence to all sounds and to what becomes of sound in words. In his Journals and in books and essays collected out of them, Thoreau imagines unmediated becoming, effortlessly. Sound becomes sense without even trying. An owl hoots and Thoreau rejoices in the instantaneous and unintended representation of his thought. A chickadee “utters its spring note,” and Thoreau is under easy obligations he repays in kind: “phe-be,” faithfully inscribed. Nothing is lost or stolen in translation because nothing is translated. Shaped by senses actually present, onomatopoeia makes sense. And when I read, it makes a sense in me. I am awakened with the bullfrogs by a noise Thoreau has somehow made my own. If I have a noise in mind, I must be somewhere, hearing it. And Thoreau is there beside me, untranslating all the while. I write poems because I love the sound of poems. My faith rests there. And Thoreau assures me faith is not misplaced. Every line, even before it is a line, and ever afterwards if it is true, instances the onomatopoeic sense of being somewhere in particular at a particular point in time. In poetry, the particular is good health to me, and saneness. As Thoreau explains, sound returns us to our senses. From doleful spells of inwardness, we are startled awake. The day is well, and it says so.
But the music is not in the tune; it is in the sound.
—Journals, June 25, 1852
Unscored, unscripted, the sense of the day is the day itself. It makes no references. Its forms transpire, indistinguishable by me from evidence of my senses. Where I put my faith I put myself. I find myself there, in passing, and there my feelings transpire, indistinguishable from the day. Thoreau’s devotion to the hale sense of all sounds sets his words in the presence of presences: each is particular, not separate; each is musical, but not recognizable in the easy way of tunes. Always original, a sound declares itself unprecedented. And of course, of course that is what I believe about true feeling. This has never happened to me before. Reading a poem I hear a sound unheard until now. Making a poem, I utter sounds whose sense is sudden and particular to the hour. In Walden, Thoreau realizes that even an echo is “an original sound” and “not merely a repetition,” and it elapses over circumstances of space and time (treetops and sunrises) particular to itself. In tuneless restless sound Thoreau discovers a keener presence of mind. He abandons his faculties to his senses. Poetry, like freedom, like love, should always be unrecognizable, particularly to itself. It abandons poetry to become a poem. In reckless devotion, Thoreau becomes the stranger who is effortless to know.
Where there is sense, experience arrives. And so does death. In the intervals, effort serves the more to postpone experience—change of circumstances, change of world—than to pronounce it. So often, work is the delay of weal and woe. Early in the history of our Republic, Thoreau upends the work ethic, averring it a distraction from the urgent business of the day: life and death. Habits of effort, ritual and piecemeal, muffle extraordinary sounds of transformation. In a wonderful biography, The Days of Henry Thoreau, Walter Harding offers a glimpse of the man in undistracted extremity. The occasion is the death of Helen Thoreau, his elder sister.
Helen died on June 14, 1849, aged only thirty-six. The funeral was held in the home on the eighteenth with both the Unitarian and the Trinitarian ministers in attendance. Thoreau sat seemingly unmoved with his family through the service, but as the pallbearers prepared to remove the bier, he arose and, taking a music box from the table, wound it and set it to playing a melody in a minor key that seemed to the listeners “like no earthly tune.” All sat quietly until the music was over.
A moment of true feeling interrupts the inertial motion of ritual. Grief defies a senseless consolation, and the defiance is a sound, “a melody like no earthly tune.” Helen, departed from Earth, is sounded no sound of Earth by her attentive brother. The onomatopoeia of extinction is a mechanical minor key. The sound of grief, whose object only is unearthly, employs no words. To speak of death, say nothing.
And Thoreau remained sound upon the efforts of speech, even to the end. Harding relays this telling vignette of a visit from one Parker Pillsbury to Thoreau only a few days before the writer’s death.
“Then I spoke only once more to him, and cannot remember my exact words. But I think my question was substantially this: ‘You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.’ Then he answered, ‘One world at a time.’”
Effortlessly, all sounds here. Elsewhere is a work of fiction worrying the minor keys.
A child loves to strike on a tin pan or other ringing vessel with a stick, because, its ears being fresh, sound, attentive, and percipient, it detects the finest music in the sound, at which all nature assists. Is not the very cope of the heavens the sounding board of the infant drummer? So clear and unprejudiced ears hear the sweetest and most soul-stirring melody in tinkling cowbells and the like (dogs baying the moon), not to be referred to association, but intrinsic in the sound itself; those cheap and simple sounds which men despise because their ears are dull and debauched. Ah, that I were so much a child that I could unfailingly draw music from a quart pot! Its little ears tingle with the melody. To it there is music in sound alone.
—Journals, June 9, 1852
Music—sustained, passionate, tenacious—remains innocent of effort. It is a feeling that persists in the act of hands, breath and senses. As melody, persistence makes the action of sound easy and sweet. Every day, Thoreau went out of the house of mourning to meet his senses where the music never stopped. Undebauched, undulled, never so much begun as continuing, the music of the day is ever available: “cheap and simple.” From the available music, Thoreau could easily draw a full day’s measure of poetry and truth, as above, in the innocent insistence of “sound alone.” Our senses make tenacity a mere matter of waking (and of walking) to the world. There, uninterrupted by insensible referral, we find everything to be intrinsic. We find no duplication. Every sound originates with itself. And so, as a passage from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers believes, “The heart is forever inexperienced.” Presence is percussion. All being makes a sound and another and then another. The truth and poetry of being are ever present unprepared, all parts particular. Here in the world, hearts hear, and a new heart beats in every sound.
Far in the night, as we were falling asleep on the bank of the Merrimack, we heard some tyro beating a drum incessantly, in preparation for a country muster, as we learned, and we thought of the line,—
“When the drum beat at dead of night.”
We could have assured him that his beat would be answered, and the forces be mustered. Fear not, thou drummer of the night; we too will be there. And still he drummed on in the silence and the dark. This stray sound from a far-off sphere came to our ears from time to time, far, sweet, and significant, and we listened with such an unprejudiced sense as if for the first time we heard at all. No doubt he was an insignificant drummer enough, but his music afforded us a prime and leisure hour, and we felt that we were in season wholly. These simple sounds related us to the stars. Ay, there was a logic in them so convincing that the combined sense of mankind could never make me doubt their conclusions. I stop my habitual thinking, as if the plow had suddenly run deeper in its furrow through the crust of the world. How can I go on, who have just stepped over such a bottomless skylight in the bog of my life? Suddenly old Time winked at me,—Ah, you know me, you rogue,—and news had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital health, I think undoubtedly it will never die. Heal yourselves, doctors; by God I live.
—from “Monday,” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
It really works. A present attention to particular sound realizes a place relating a place of one’s own therein: a new world and new words; a poem. Hearing the real, incessant drum-taps straying through the dark, Thoreau is instantly “in season wholly,” i.e., alert and fertile, i.e., present for a change. And change comes. The logic of the onomatopoeic instant overturns all convictions and previous logic. It is a wilding of habit. It is a deeper ground. It is a poem, as only poetry could overstep a skylight in a bog. The wink of Time in allegorical rough-and-ready assures us that Time is well. Surely the well-being of Time is news that stays news: i.e., a poem.
It is not words that I wish to hear or to utter—but relations that I seek to stand in …
—Journals, December 22, 1851
Sounds occur to our hearing: to our hearing. They are immediately related, and we receive them in unique relationship. From Thoreau, I learn that poetry is not words primarily. Not even words are words originally. First comes sound. Standing or walking in his faith, Thoreau was always positioned to hear what Whitman, in a like place, called “the origin of all poems.” Poetry is first a relation to the sounds of a day and only subsequently the relating of itself in sentences and lines. And what comes first is, eventually, enough. Composer Charles Ives, the most articulate Thoreauvian of all, once announced “American music is already written.” In the moments of days, for anyone standing in good relation to the sounds, American poetry is also already written. Thoreau says so.
Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament—the gospel according to this moment.
— “Walking”
By the sound of things, unbelated is eternal. I awaken to no immediate danger. The gospel is right on time.