In reviewing in November, 1943, the Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode, American Literature gave the book the commendation it so richly deserved, but, except at a single point, did not consider it critically in detail. I hope it is not too late for a few more critical remarks about this admirable but not impeccable piece of work.

A few weeks ago a member of the staff of the Library of Congress asked me whether I thought the poem “Carpe Diem,” printed over the signature H. T. in the Boatswain's Whistle for November 16, 1864, was really written by Thoreau, as some persons had assumed. I had to say in reply that it did not sound like Thoreau to me and that the initials H. T. seemed to be evidence against that ascription rather than for it, since Thoreau always used his middle initial D. in his signature. I then learned that Dr. Bode had included the poem in his collection, and I consulted the book to learn what evidence he had. Here I found that “Carpe Diem,” so far as known, had been printed only in that ephemeral periodical, which was issued for the National Sailors' Fair held in Boston in 1864. The number containing the poem contained also a genuine Thoreau first printing. Dr. Bode's note on the poem says:

One such volume was sold at the Wakeman sale (Wakeman catalogue, number 1017). There it is described as including an article by Thoreau, “Looming of the Sun,” and a poem. The article appeared shortly thereafter in the Atlantic Monthly, according to the Wakeman entry; and the entry concludes with a description of two letters from Francis H. Allen relative to the priority of the article in the Boatswain's Whistle. The article referred to appears as part of “The Highland Light” in the Atlantic Monthly for Dec., 1864. The poem does not. In the Boatswain's Whistle there is a poem—not in the article—entitled “Carpe Diem” and signed “H. T.” The authenticity of the poem is thus reasonably established.

I could not agree with this last statement, but obviously the next thing for me to do was to look up the catalogue of the sale of Stephen H. Wakeman's library, especially as my name had been brought in and I had no recollection of being consulted as to the poem. I now found that item No. 1017 in that catalogue is described as follows:

Contains an article “Looming of the Sun” by Thoreau, which is its first appearance. It also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1864. The Atlantic Monthly for December, 1864, was not published until November 28, 1864, hence the appearance of the poem in the “Boatswain's Whistle” is its first. Accompanying the volume are two letters, both from Francis H. Allen, relative to the priority of the article in the “Boatswain's Whistle.”

It will be seen that this contains no direct statement about any poem attributed to Thoreau. The word “poem” where it occurs is evidently a slip of the pen for “article,” since there was never any question of the priority of any poem. Thus a hasty reading of a carelessly written sentence—for which, of course, Mr. Wakeman himself, then no longer living, was in no way responsible—supplies the only evidence (?) that Wakeman ever attributed “Carpe Diem” to Thoreau.

There are other reasons for doubting the authenticity of this poem as a Thoreau item. I have already pointed out the improbability of Thoreau's signing himself as H. T. Might someone else have attached those initials to a poem of Thoreau's? That too seems improbable. If the editor of the Boatswain's Whistle had printed the poem knowing it to be Thoreau's, he would almost certainly have used Thoreau's name, as in the case of the article. If it had been taken from a printed source, that source would probably have been indicated. If, on the other hand, some friend had contributed it, that friend—Sanborn or Sophia Thoreau or Channing, presumably—would have signed Thoreau's full name to it and would certainly have seen to it that this ephemeral publication was not its last. Sanborn, for instance, always keen to publish everything of Thoreau's that he could by any means unearth, could never have believed that he wrote “Carpe Diem.” We must conclude that the editor of the Sailors' Fair publication did not accept the poem as Thoreau's.

And then there is the poem itself. Thoreau undoubtedly wrote worse verse than this, but I am not aware that he ever wrote anything in this vein. Dr. Bode himself calls it a “trite and moralizing jingle.”

So much for “Carpe Diem.” I leave it to the specialists to say whether it can longer be regarded as belonging to the Thoreau canon.¹

My study of this case led me to a further examination of the book. I found it to be a very scholarly performance. Criticism from a brother editor who knows a little of the patient care that must have gone into the making of this book will not, I hope, seem too ungracious, but Dr. Bode's path was full of pitfalls, and perhaps I ought to call attention to a few that he did not succeed in avoiding.

First, I must speak of one matter that hits me rather nearly, for I, the surviving partner in the editorship of Thoreau's published Journal, must bear the brunt of Dr. Bode's mistaken criticism of my senior, Bradford Torrey. Indeed, it was I who, as his collaborator, did practically all of the textual editing of the Journal. On page 274 of the book I read the inexplicable statement that “Bradford Torrey, as he explains in his introduction, punctuated and emended the text of the Journal in order to regularize its grammar and style.” This reads something into Torrey's introduction that positively is not there. Torrey explained in his preface why it was necessary for the comfort of the ordinary reader to revise Thoreau's original punctuation, which consisted largely of dashes, often distributed in a quite meaningless manner; but he said nothing whatever, either there or in the Introduction, about emending the text in order to regularize its grammar and style; and nothing of the kind was done, as I can say of my own knowledge. The reader of the printed Journal will find frequent interpolations of bracketed words where Thoreau had carelessly omitted some word, usually a short one, that was obviously necessary to the sense. Such interpolations, always indicated by brackets, cannot be called emendations to regularize grammar or style. They were necessary not only for the convenience of the reader but also to assure him that the omissions were Thoreau's own and not the copyist's nor the printer's. Similarly, such antiquated spellings as “prophane” were allowed to stand unregularized, and the good old New England word “stent” was not changed to the dictionary's “stint.” I find it very difficult to account for Dr. Bode's misreading of Torrey's statement, which applied only to the punctuation. The only explanation I can think of is that Dr. Bode must have been writing from memory and that his memory played him false.

Unfortunately this error led him to declare that the printed Journal was “an eclectic and insecure text” and to say that Harrison Blake in his four volumes drawn from Thoreau's journal “did not try to regularize it to the extent that Torrey did.” As a matter of fact, Blake's text is not so accurate as that of the complete Journal, though the present writer has done much to make it more accurate by the corrections that in an editorial capacity he has had made in the electrotype plates.

I ought to say that another practice of the Journal's editors that Dr. Bode objected to was the manner of dealing with Thoreau's own penciled emendations in his journal. Our practice, which seems to me the only sensible one to adopt in such cases, was to print the original form when the emended form appeared in any one of Thoreau's already published books, and the passage as emended when this was its first publication. In that way the reader could always be sure of seeing, in one place or the other, the passage just as Thoreau wished it left, and could also have the satisfaction of seeing the original journal form of the already published passage. As this treatment was explained in the preface, it seems hardly fair to call the resulting text eclectic and insecure.

I have a few more criticisms to offer. The editor's plan was to take as the basic text of every poem the one that last passed under the eye of its author. In some cases this plan led to unfortunate results. I will give two instances. One is the omission of the title and the first stanza of “The Shrike,” which appears in the Journal under date of February 25, 1839, but for which the editor's rule makes it necessary to use in his text only the second stanza, which appeared in the Dial in 1842, where the title and first stanza were not needed because the fragment was introduced by a bit of prose about the shrike. The title and first stanza are relegated to the notes, where they will not be seen by the average reader.

The other case in point is the poem which, as it appears in the first edition of the Week, begins:

On Ponkawtasset, since, with such delay,
Down this still stream we took our meadowy way,
A poet wise has settled. …

Dr. Bode uses the second edition for his text. This was published in 1868, after its author's death, so he could not have read the proofs, but it contains alterations “probably taken from an annotated copy of the first edition left by Thoreau among his effects,” as I said in my Bibliography of Thoreau. The version in this 1868 edition begins:

On Ponkawtasset, since, we took our way,
Down this still stream to far Billericay,
A poet wise has settled. …

It is obvious that the commas after “since” and “way” are superfluous and make nonsense of the lines. To quote myself again, they “may be set down to a careless marking of the copy, which left the original punctuation of the line while it altered the words and the syntax.” Surely it is only doing Thoreau a disservice to perpetuate this mispunctuation in what may be regarded as a definitive edition of his poems.

On page 112 I find “lead” where clearly “led” is meant and where the printed Journal has “led.” This was not the sort of mistake that Thoreau made in spelling. No variant appears in the meticulous Textual Notes, and I suspect this of being a typographical error. In the first line of the poem on page 148 “command” should, I think, be “commend,” as in the printed Journal. The notes give a reference to the latter text but no variant. Here, as in some other cases, I suspect Thoreau's handwriting has been misread.

On page 189 appears a hitherto unpublished poem from a manuscript, beginning, “For though the caves were rabitted,” whatever that may mean. I wonder if they were not really eaves that were rabetted, or rabbeted. Thoreau knew wild rabbits so well that he would hardly have omitted one of the b's, while he might well have forgotten how to spell the carpenter's term. The mention of well sweeps and houses in the next two lines does not suggest caves. And I find it hard to believe that Thoreau did not know how to spell “idiot,” though he might have forgotten to dot the second i.

Page 209: “I hid beneath their lea.” The manuscript original may have had “lea,” but Sanborn's version has the correct “lee.” Here again one regrets the necessity (?) of perpetuating an obvious error.

Page 337: In reference to the river of Thoreau's Week it should be noted that “Merrimac” is not, as Dr. Bode says, the present-day spelling, though it intervened between the “Merrimack” of Thoreau's day and its revival by the United States Geographic Board a few years ago. The notes here state that the fieldfare is a European thrush, which is true, of course, but Thoreau, who never borrowed European birds for his writing, was quite certainly referring to the American robin, which Nuttall, whose Manual of Ornithology he knew, called the American fieldfare. This was evidently only a book name for the bird, but old Mark Catesby had called it the fieldfare of Carolina a hundred years earlier, as my friend W. L. McAtee informs me.

Page 362: Paestum's temples are Grecian, to be sure, but the Greeks built them in Italy.

Page 365: Here the editor's definition of the word “rider” is not quite correct, when he calls it “one piece (of wood, here) used to cover another.” The line annotated is, “And cleared the topmost rider sine care,” and it is evident that Thoreau was speaking of the top rail of a stake-and-rider fence, which he and his companion cleared in a hurry after helping themselves from the heap of apples.

Since writing the foregoing I have dragged my net through the text of the poems and have brought up a few more questionable readings, to which, for the sake of doing a thorough job, I ought to call attention. Here they are:

Page 86, line 14: I can hardly believe that Thoreau really wrote “E'ne” instead of “E'en,” though his handwriting might have made it look so.

Page 94, line 14: “And the leaves when whirling away.” The printed Journal has “went” instead of “when.” Has Dr. Bode misread the manuscript? If not, I submit that the earlier editor's correction of so obvious a slip of the pen was fully justified.

Page 95, line 13: If T. really wrote “an waking,” it seems regrettable that the “an” couldn't have been quietly changed to “a,” as in the printed Journal.

Page 136, line 4: Somebody evidently left out “rod” after “golden.” If it was Thoreau, it might well have been bracketed in.

Page 138, line 3: “Where” would make better sense than “Whose” and might have been mistaken for it.

Page 140, line 5: “Sidireal” for “sidereal” is not a likely mistake for so good a Latinist as Thoreau. Couldn't the word have been read in the correct spelling? Did he really dot that second vowel?

Page 163, line 1: “Is then [?] no road”: Couldn't that queried “then” have been read as the correct “there,” as the Journal editors made it?

Page 168, line 6: Surely that “&” must have been “I” in the manuscript.

Page 173, line 5: Might not that queried “once” have really been “even”? “Is as immortal even as the proudest flower” would at least make sense. In his note on this line Dr. Bode seems to regret that Thoreau emended “immortal” to “well named,” recalling the famous dispute with Lowell over the “immortal” pine tree; but really “well named” is the better reading here, I think, since it was the naming of the plant by the botanist that T. was referring to.

Page 226, line 4: I suppose we must believe that Thoreau slipped an extra e into “Meteors” here, but the last line of the poem shows that he did know how to spell the word.

I finished reading the Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau with a higher opinion of Thoreau as a poet than I had had before. I have Dr. Bode to thank for this quickened appreciation, and I feel certain that many others will have the same experience and feel the same gratitude. I now hope that a second edition will make it a still better book.

Notes

1. Professor Raymond Adams, whose judgment on Thoreau matters is certainly well founded, writes me that though he had formerly been led to believe that the poem was genuine Thoreau, now, after another look at the Wakeman catalogue and considering all the available evidence, he is convinced that he was mistaken.