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What are some similes and personification examples in Thoreau's Walden?
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Thoreau's Walden contains various instances of personification and similes. One example of personification is when Thoreau compares age and youth to instructors, suggesting that they can profit or lose. Another instance is when he personifies the sun, assigning it a male gender. Examples of similes include the comparison of abandoned initiatives to stranded vessels and the likening of human nature's fragility to the bloom on fruits. Thoreau also suggests that our moulting season should represent a profound change, much like birds shedding their feathers.
In the first chapter of Walden, Thoreau utilizes personification in his comparison of age and youth. He writes, "Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost." Neither age nor youth can literally instruct, profit, or lose; these are qualities that can only, in the literal sense, apply to human beings and their constructs.
Later in the first chapter, Thoreau utilizes a simile, "One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels." In this sentence, Thoreau observes that the initiatives of a generation are rejected and left behind when the next generation comes along, like boats that are either dead in the water or washed ashore and vacated by the people sailing in them.
Also in the first chapter, Thoreau personifies the sun in saying, "I never assisted the sun materially in...
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his rising." He assigns the male gender to the sun and affirms that it was important that he, Thoreau, was there to witness its ascent, though he played no part in its celestial movement.
And finally, still in chapter 1, Thoreau employs another simile in his literal and metaphoric discussion of man's clothing. He writes, "Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives." He asserts that mankind should follow nature's example. A change of clothes should represent a more profound change in one's life, as it does when birds shed their feathers to accommodate new growth, or, as he goes on to say, snakes shed a skin or caterpillars their coat.
Personification is the assigning of human attributes to abstract concepts or inanimate objects. Thoreau does this in Walden when he writes,
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.
In the above quote, Thoreau describes life as if it is a human being one can meet, greet, shun, and insult. Just as we shouldn't be rude and cruel to other people, so too should we be gentle with our own lives.
Similes are comparisons using the words "like" or "as." Thoreau uses a simile in the following statement:
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling.
He compares our best qualities to the bloom, or color, on ripe fruits. Just as fruits are fragile and can be bruised and damaged by rough handling, so can our better natures be harmed. This use of an image—in this case, an object (fruit) that we can see in our mind's eye—helps us understand how carefully we need to protect the best parts of ourselves.
Another simile is the one below:
One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.
Again, we can visualize a lonely, stranded vessel, such as a ship.
In Walden, Thoreau writes, "The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly." Here, using a simile, Thoreau compares the best parts of ourselves to fragile flowers that require great care; however, he says, we don't protect our finest qualities at all.
Further, Thoreau says that "All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles." Thoreau believes that we buy new clothes much too quickly. He wonders, here, if we should not purchase new clothes until we have accomplished so much in the old that we feel strange and incongruous in them. He uses a simile to compare this feeling to the strange feeling of putting new wine into old bottles.
Along these same lines, he says, "We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without." Here, using a simile, he compares us and our consumption of clothing to plants that, apparently, put on layer after layer in their growth process. Obviously, this is not something vital to our growth.
Provide examples of simile and personification in Walden.
It's not surprising that Thoreau should use personification given his pantheistic worldview. Like all pantheists, he regards everything in this world—fauna and flora, rocks and trees, man and animals, (indeed man and God)—as all linked together in a gigantic cosmic unity.
As far as Thoreau is concerned, the features of the natural world he so deeply venerates have as much personality as any human he's ever encountered; more so, in fact. We can see this point illustrated in one particularly notable passage of Walden, where he describes the lips of the lake:
These are the lips of the lake, on which no beard grows. It licks its chops from time to time.
The lake, of course, isn't literally a mouth, let alone a human one. But Thoreau's use of personification dramatizes the lake's presence in nature, allowing us to feel the same kind of connection to it as Thoreau himself feels.
A great example of simile comes when Thoreau describes humans in so-called civilized society as living "meanly, like ants." This is the core of Thoreau's whole philosophy. He sees community living as tending towards the dissolution of individuality, crushing the individual spirit beneath the tyranny of the majority.
In society, we are no longer truly human, but rather like ants in an anthill, busily running around in pursuit of common endeavors without stopping to think of ourselves and our own individual needs.
In WaldenHenry David Thoreau uses both personification and simile. He uses personification to give things of nature human qualities while he creates comparisons with similes to provide the reader with imagery.
At the beginning of chapter 5, “Solitude,” Thoreau is describing the wind and the surface of the lake as night comes upon it. He uses a simile to make comparisons that create visual imagery.
Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface.
The wind is raising small waves, “ripples,” on the surface of the lake and Thoreau likens his peacefulness to those small waves. The surface of the water indicates that there are no storms kicking up the water instead there is simply a gentle breeze in the trees that is not threatening to his well-being, his “serenity.”
In Chapter 7, “The Bean-Field” Thoreau personifies his bean plants.
Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off.
By saying his beans were “impatient” he is giving the plants a human quality that means the plants need tending immediately because they grew so quickly. As he continues his statement, he again personifies the plants saying they could not be “put off.” In other words, he could not ignore them; he needs to take care of them so they grow properly.