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WorkHenry David Thoreau

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

A two-week river trip with his brother, folded into seven days and filled with everything Thoreau had read and thought in the ten years since.

by Henry David Thoreau490 passages held

  • English, the original language, and your language
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First published
(aged 32)
Original language
English

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Overview

On the last day of August 1839 two brothers from Concord, Henry and John Thoreau, pushed off in a fifteen-foot boat they had built that spring. They went down the Concord River to the Merrimack and up it into New Hampshire, and were away two weeks. In 1842 John died of tetanus. Henry Thoreau spent much of the next seven years turning the trip into a book in his brother's memory, and finished the first draft at Walden Pond, where he lived from 4 July 1845 to 6 September 1847. A Week folds the two weeks into seven days, a chapter for each, and lets the slow river carry whatever Thoreau wanted to think about: the shad and salmon shut out of the Concord by the dam at Billerica, the frontier wars between settlers and Indians, the Greek poets, the Bhagavad Gita, friendship. Under the digressions runs one claim: a person who travels attentively through his own county has the same access to the divine that the old poets and scriptures had, and the churches of New England stand in the way of it. The "Sunday" chapter sets the gods of Greece and the scriptures of India beside the Bible and does not rank the Bible first. Publishers turned the manuscript down, and in 1849 James Munroe of Boston printed 1,000 copies, but at the author's expense. James Russell Lowell, the poet and critic, reviewed it at length that December, praising the prose and objecting to the digressions. Only 219 copies sold and 75 were given away; in October 1853 Munroe sent him back the 706 that were left, and Thoreau took up work as a land surveyor to pay off what he had borrowed. He went on correcting the text, and a revised edition appeared in 1868, six years after his death.

Key concepts

What does Thoreau mean by 'here or nowhere is our heaven'?

He means that whatever is divine has to be found in this world and this life, since there is no other place to look. We can conceive of nothing fairer, he says, than something we have experienced. The remedy is sharper perception: we need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish. People need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, and at home on the ground they live on.

What does Thoreau mean by a Friend?

A Friend, written with a capital, is someone bound to another by affinity and by what each hopes the other can become. Thoreau separates this from associates and confidants. Friendship of this kind cannot be produced by professions or advances; it follows after silence, as buds on a graft open only long after the graft has taken. It is rare, and he doubts whether anyone is noble enough for a true and lasting one.

Why does Thoreau value fables over historical fact?

He values a fable because it satisfies the imagination before it addresses the understanding, and so carries what he calls a higher poetical truth. When Bacchus drives sailors to leap into the sea and become dolphins, nobody asks whether it happened. Such stories grow by slow addition over generations, and the nursery tales of today were those of the earliest peoples. He sees in this repetition an approach to a universal language.

What does Silence mean at the end of A Week?

Silence is, for Thoreau, the ground that all sound and speech stand out against, and the place where the best speech ends. It is audible to all people, at all times and in all places: we hear it when we hear inwardly, and sound when we hear outwardly. All sounds are its servants. Creation has not displaced it but is its visible framework. As the truest society comes ever nearer to solitude, so the best speech finally falls into silence.

What two kinds of poets does Thoreau distinguish?

He distinguishes poets who cultivate life from poets who cultivate art. The first seek food for nourishment and the second for flavour. Behind this lies a division between writing of genius, which is inspired and gives the law to criticism, and writing of intellect and taste, done in the intervals of inspiration. Poetry of the first kind he calls the mysticism of mankind: its expressions cannot be analysed, because the poet's sentence is one word.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The river near home and what it remembers

What can two weeks on a slow river a few miles from home show a traveller? Thoreau finds the shad, the frontier wars and the whole span of history on its banks.

Thoreau never leaves New England, and argues that he need not. The frontier, he writes, lies wherever a man fronts a fact. On the Concord he takes the side of the shad, shut out by the dam at Billerica, and asks who hears the fishes when they cry. On the Merrimack he retells the frontier wars: Captain Lovewell's march against the Indians, and Hannah Dustan paddling home with ten scalps. History shrinks as he goes. Sixty old women holding hands, he reckons, would reach from Eve to his own mother.

  • nature
  • travel
  • landscape
  • time
  • memory
  • history
  • historical memory
  • colonialism
  • civilization
  • commerce
  • labor
  • experience
  • perception

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Gods, scriptures and poets set beside the Bible

Why should one people's scripture outrank all the others? Thoreau reads the New Testament, the Bhagavad Gita and the Greek myths as one shelf, and the churches of New England come off worst.

In his pantheon, Thoreau says, Pan still reigns, and no god ever dies. He admires the New Testament and thinks the churches have kept it from being heard: one of its sentences rightly read from a pulpit would leave no stone of the meetinghouse standing. He names Christ beside Buddha and holds that it takes a non-Christian to see the beauty of Christ's life. The Bhagavad Gita lifts him higher in thought than any other book, though he finds Krishna's case for fighting defective. Poets belong on the same shelf, and some farmers who never wrote are greater than Homer.

  • religion
  • poetry
  • literature
  • truth
  • knowledge
  • imagination
  • contemplation
  • aesthetics
  • irony

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Friendship that expects all the virtues

What do friends owe each other that kind neighbours do not? Thoreau's answer makes friendship the hardest of human relations and the one most easily lost.

A Friend, in Thoreau's long essay inside the Wednesday chapter, is one who expects all the virtues from us and can appreciate them. Kindness has little to do with it. Neighbours will feed and clothe the body; a Friend does that office for the spirit, and Friendship has not much human blood in it. Its language is meanings, and real talk between friends falls short of the talk each imagined. Its only danger is that it will end, since the least unworthiness spoils it. He remembers it like heat lightning in past summers.

  • friendship
  • love
  • virtue
  • authenticity
  • mortality
  • human nature

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Within this work

passages held
490
distinct concepts
686
by passages held, corpus-wide
#151

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “nature” and “perception”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 91 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
natureperception30
naturetime20
aestheticsnature15
naturepoetry8
perceptiontime7
aestheticsperception6
aestheticspoetry6
memoryperception5
memorynature4
naturereligion3
aestheticstime2
friendshipmemory2
friendshiptime2
memorypoetry2
aestheticsmemory1
friendshipnature1
friendshipreligion1
memorytime1
perceptionreligion1
poetryreligion1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1849 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers you are here EN
  2. 1854 Walden

    The book Thoreau is known by, and the second of only two he published in his lifetime. It came out of the stay at the pond, during which he also finished the first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, but was not published until 1854.

     EN
  3. 1863 Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

    Lectures, reviews and magazine essays from about 1840 to 1863, several of them printed only after Thoreau's death in 1862. They run from an 1843 review of a plan to abolish labor by means of machinery to the anti-slavery speeches of the 1850s and the late nature essays.

     EN
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