In Walden, Thoreau attaches enormous significance to morning. He calls himself "as sincere a worshiper of Aurora (i.e., dawn) as the Greeks" and writes that "every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself." The beauty and stillness of the morning, for Thoreau, invites reflection, and he argues that the morning is when the mind and the body are the most awake. It is then that people are at their most creative and that they are reminded that life has begun anew. Thoreau wants to live life to the fullest, which he believes can best be done in solitude; and the morning, when his senses are most acute, is the best time to do this.

On one level, this paean to morning is essentially metaphorical—as Thoreau writes, to "affect the quality of the day" is the "highest of arts." He means that to live a life that is a reflection of nature, that is itself natural, is better than to create a painting or a sculpture. Moreover, as he writes, to thinkers "whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning." He means, in short, that to think deeply and to cast aside the things in the world that are inauthentic is to be "awake." So in this sense, he intends his time at Walden to be an extended morning, one in which his senses and his intellect are heightened in a way they could never be amid the rush and the noise of society. Indeed, he makes it clear that neither mechanical clocks nor the routine of everyday work (a reality for more and more people in Thoreau's rapidly-industrializing world) would "awaken" people to the kind of "morning" he is really writing about.