Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Rhetorical Devices
Anaphora
Simile
More
" The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled."
" They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones; nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water."
Rhetorical Shift- He uses rhetorical shifts throughout the chapter to refute what is being said in the previous sentences.
Rhetorical Question- Thoreau uses rhetorical questions consistantly to guide to reader to think how they should think.
Tone- The tone in this chapter is very calm and peacuful, which is due to his word choice in the chapter.
Themes- Isolation, and Man in the Natural Word
Structure-According to Walden Study Text, Thoreau’s structure has no plot line, or story. It simply explains his experiences at Walden and connects it to society and the way we live.
Style- Thoreau’s style consists of a very simple structure, but with complex ideas. The way he varies his sentence structure is poetic. Also he uses nature to explain an extended metaphor about life.
"...give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven."
"Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, and object of interest to all passers".
"Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming,..."
Polysyndeton
"...with compass and chain and sounding line."
" Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and channel."
"...rain and snow and evaporation, though..."
"When such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider's web..."
"While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the prudent landloard..."
"...methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded... ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on a stack..."
"Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude , and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there"
Juxtaposition
"So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, Capacious bed of waters----."
"...wherein the thought scures its own condidtions,--- changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh."
Alliteration
"...the long lost bottom of Walden..."
Peronification
"You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond , as if he kept summer locked up at home."
Allusions
HIndu
" O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to real us to this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether."
Biblical
"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads"
Greek
"...if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from these parts."
"If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves his shallow in that side."
