The Author of Little Women Mourned the Denizen of Walden Pond—National Poetry Month 2024

 Henry David Thoreau, pictured in the late 1840's, and Louisa May Alcott photographed circa 1860.

As a girl in Concord, Massachusetts Louisa May Alcott lived across the street from Ralph Waldo Emerson and was the playmate of his beloved son Waldo before he died in 1842.  Her father Branson Alcott was a starry-eyed dreamer, education reformer, would-be philosopher, and failed Utopian who was in Emerson’s circle and a Transcendentalist.  Henry David Thoreau sometimes baby sat her and entertained the neighborhood children with short hikes and wood lore.  

Thoreau died of consumption—tuberculosis—in 1862 at age 44 shortly before Louisa’s turn as a Civil War volunteer nurse the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Virginia.  She was still in Concord when he died in February and was grief stricken by the loss of her dear friend. Ten years later Louisa purchased Thoreau’s last house. 

A children's book inspired by Alcott's poem and her childhood among the Concord Transcendentalists.
 

Thoreau’s Flute

We sighing said, “Our Pan is dead;

His pipe hangs mute beside the river

Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,

But Music’s airy voice is fled.

Spring mourns as for untimely frost;

The bluebird chants a requiem;

The willow-blossom waits for him;

The Genius of the wood is lost.”

Then from the flute, untouched by hands,

There came a low, harmonious breath:

 “For such as he there is no death;

His life the eternal life commands;”

Above man’s aims his nature rose.

The wisdom of a just content

Made one small spot a continent

And turned to poetry life’s prose.

Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,

Swallow and aster, lake and pine,

To him grew human or divine,

Fit mates for this large-hearted child.

Such homage Nature ne’er forgets,

And yearly on the coverlid ‘Neath which her darling lieth hid

Will write his name in violets.

To him no vain regrets belong

Whose soul, that finer instrument,

Gave to the world no poor lament,

But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.

O lonely friend! he still will be

A potent presence, though unseen,

Steadfast, sagacious, and serene;

Seek not for him—he is with thee.

 

—Louisa May Alcott

 

First published in the Atlantic Monthly, September 1863

 

A Friend’s Umbrella by Lawrence Raab—National Poetry Month 2023

                                        Ralph Waldo Emerson in his later years but before his memory failed.

Prolific contemporary American poet Lawrence Raab painted a touching portrait of a great mind trapped  by what we now recognize as Alzheimer’s disease.    Ralph Waldo Emerson—the most important and influential American thinker and writer of the first half of the 19th Century—remained active as a lecturer and author into the post-Civil War era.  But by 1879 to the despair of family and friends he had to give up public appearances.  In his own words he explained:

I am not in condition to make visits, or take any part in conversation. Old age has rushed on me in the last year, and tied my tongue, and hid my memory, and thus made it a duty to stay at home.

Old friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, the physician and poet, lamented:

Emerson is afraid to trust himself in society much, on account of the failure of his memory and the great difficulty he finds in getting the words he wants. It is painful to witness his embarrassment at times.

The great man  died in his beloved Concord home on April 27, 1883.

                                Lawrence Raab.

Raab was born in 1946 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.  He graduated from Middlebury College in 1968, and from Syracuse University with an MA in 1972. He taught at American University, University of Michigan, and since 1976 Williams College. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and the Virginia Quarterly Review.  He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Raab is the respected author of several collections of poetry and was honored with the 1992 National Poetry Series award, for his book What We Don’t Know About Each Other and a  Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.

A Friend’s Umbrella

Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end

of his life, found the names

of familiar objects escaping him.

He wanted to say something about a window,

or a table, or a book on a table.

 

But the word wasn’t there,

although other words could still suggest

the shape of what he meant.

Then someone, his wife perhaps,

would understand: “Yes, window! I’m sorry,

is there a draft?”

He’d nod.

Shed rise. Once a friend dropped by

 

to visit, shook out his umbrella

in the hall, remarked upon the rain.

 

Later the word umbrella

vanished and became

the thing that strangers take away.

 

Paper, pen, table, book:

was it possible for a man to think

without them? To know

that he was thinking? We remember

that we forget, he’d written once,

before he started to forget.

 

Three times he was told

that Longfellow had died.

 

Without the past, the present

lay around him like the sea.

Or like a ship, becalmed,

upon the sea. He smiled

to think he was the captain then,

gazing off into whiteness,

waiting for the wind to rise.

 

—Lawrence Raab

 

From The History of Forgetting. © 2009 Lawrence Raab published by Penguin Poets.