A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau

First published: 1849

Type of work: Memoir

The Work:

In 1839, two years after his graduation from Harvard College, Henry David Thoreau and his brother John built a riverboat with their own hands and took the leisurely trip that provides the framework for Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Although the work is based on a real experience, Thoreau molded his material to fit his artistic requirements. Thus the actual time of the trip is reduced to seven days, each represented by a chapter in the work. The author does not hesitate to introduce observations and references to literary works that occur in his journals years after the actual journey. It is a mistake, then, to consider this work as a travel journal, just as it is a mistake to consider Thoreau’s Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1854) as merely a treatise on domestic economy.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers includes both prose and poetry and often provides meticulous observations about the flora, fauna, and geography of the areas through which the boat passes. For instance, the sight of a fisherman leads the author early in the work to discuss at length the fish in shoals in the stream and the “fish principle in nature” that disseminates the seeds of life everywhere so that wherever there is a fluid medium, there are fish. In this respect, the work is somewhat like the scientific data gathering in nineteenth century works such as Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). The work, however, is neither a naturalist’s handbook nor a traveler’s guide.

Actually, the geographical journey down the rivers is a metaphor for the reader’s journey into the mind of the author. As Thoreau relates what he saw and thought as he drifted down the river, the reader enters the flow of ideas in the writer’s mind. Just as the current of the stream bears along the boat with Thoreau and his brother, so the current of ideas in Thoreau’s mind bears along the reader by evoking the joy and nostalgia that the author feels for those lost, golden days. As Thoreau says, human life is very much like a river running always downward to the sea, and, in this book, the reader enters for a moment the flow of Thoreau’s unique existence.

One must remember that the circumstances of Thoreau’s life provide an undercurrent of emotion in this apparently tranquil holiday as he recalled it in the solitude of Walden Pond. Both Henry and his brother John had been deeply in love with the same girl, Ellen Sewall, the daughter of a prominent New England family. John had first proposed marriage to her and had been refused; Henry fared no better. Perhaps their relative poverty was a contributing factor in their rejection. The two brothers were therefore friendly rivals, and their relationship occasions a long discussion of the nature of friendship. When one says that someone is a friend, one commonly means only that he or she is not an enemy. The true friend, however, will say, “Consent only to be what you are. I alone will never stand in your way.” The violence of love is dangerous; durable friendship is serene and equable. The only danger of friendship is that it will end. Such was the emotional relationship of the two brothers.

Yet their friendship was to end. Within a year after their trip, John died suddenly and horribly. Thoreau could not look back to their vacation on the rivers without realizing that the happiness of those times could never be repeated. In a very real sense, the work is a prose elegy for his dead brother, the true friend, the rival in love. As in all elegies, the reader follows the progress of the mourner’s soul as it seeks consolation for the loss, and the consolation comes from the passage of the seasons and the observation of the natural processes of death and regeneration. This unstated elegiac element is the main motive for the composition. Why grieve for a particular lost friend when all the world is subject to decay and change? Every natural object when carefully observed shows the natural process of death and rebirth. If one must grieve, one should therefore grieve for the sadness of all things and the transitory nature of all beauty found in the material world. So if one were to go to a New England village such as Sudbury, one would see in great detail the teeming activity there, but one must not forget that it was settled by people who were once as much alive as the people there now, but who are all gone, their places taken by new people. The Indians are replaced by the white settlers and the settlers in turn by their children. The Concord and Merrimack rivers flow timelessly into the sea; every individual life flows to its conclusion. The passage of the seasons is cyclical in that every autumn implies a future springtime. The voyage on the rivers is circular, and the two brothers return to their point of departure; thus life must pass back into the great body from which it was first drawn.

Thoreau’s thinking is strongly conditioned by Romantic ideas. The whole book represents a return to nature. The author sees an accord between nature and the human spirit. He observes that he has a singular yearning for all wildness. He values cultural primitivism. He says that gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. In fact, there may be an excess of cultivation that makes civilization pathetic. Thoreau’s poetry is plainly in the style of the English Romantics, written in ballad measure and celebrating nature and primitive heroes:

Some hero of the ancient mold,Some arm of knightly worth,Of strength unbought, and faith unsold,Honored this spot of earth.

Among poets, Thoreau praises Homer because he lived in an age when emotions flowed uncorrupted by excessive cultivation. Like William Wordsworth, he has a theory that the world is but a canvas to human imagination. He says that surely there is a life of the mind above the wants of the body and independent of it and that this life is expressed through cultivation of the capacity of the imagination. Like many Romantic writers, Thoreau seems to exalt the emotions at the expense of the rational faculty. He says that people have a respect for scholarship and learning that is out of proportion to the uses these commonly serve and that the scholar has not the skill to emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer’s call to his team. For Thoreau, act and feeling should be valued above abstract thought.

Thoreau’s work constitutes a major document in Transcendentalist thought. His observation that a farmer directing his team of horses is as important as a scholar’s thought is connected to the theological notion that every person is called to perform a peculiar activity, to fill a particular place in life. This view—that life presents a duty for everyone, that music is the sound of universal laws promulgated, and that marching is set to the pulse of the hero beating in unison with the pulse of nature and stepping to the measure of the universe—is characteristic of the pervasive moralism in Transcendentalist thought. When Thoreau looks at a sunset, he records that he is grateful to be reminded by interior evidence of the permanence of universal laws. In other words, by personal intuition a person watching a sunset is aware of an immanent deity presiding over the universe and providing people with an ethical imperative, a duty to do.

At the end of the week, Thoreau’s boat grates once more on the bulrushes of its native port. The trip provides a framework to support a vast weight of Thoreau’s thought—direct observation of nature, elegiac sentiment, Romantic and Transcendentalist notions—all flowing naturally across the mind of a young man as he drifts through the pastoral countryside of nineteenth century New England.

Bibliography

Cafaro, Philip. Thoreau’s Living Ethics: “Walden” and the Pursuit of Virtue. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Examines Thoreau’s ethical philosophy, focusing on Walden but also considering his other works, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Explains how Thoreau’s ideas are part of a tradition of ethical thinking that dates from the ancients to the present day.

Drake, William. “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” In Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Sherman Paul. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Easily accessible essay argues that Thoreau’s trip on the Concord and Merrimack rivers is an exploratory journey into thought.

Fink, Steven. Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Contains a detailed discussion of the structure of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and how Thoreau composed the book.

Johnson, Linck C. Thoreau’s Complex Weave: The Writing of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1986. Extensive study focuses on both the complete version of the book and its first draft, which is included in its entirety.

Myerson, Joel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Collection of essays includes discussions of Thoreau’s reputation, Thoreau and Concord, Thoreau and Emerson, and Thoreau and reform. An essay by Linck C. Johnson provides an analysis of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Illustrated “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” Edited by Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. The text of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is accompanied by photographs by Herbert Wendell Gleason that visually document Thoreau’s rivers. Includes an informative historical introduction to the book.