Poem of the week: Sic Vita by Henry David Thoreau | Books

Sic Vita

(“It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself”
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers)

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.

A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.

A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.

And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.

Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they’re rife.

But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life’s vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.

That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) was an American renaissance man – writer, naturalist, flower-lover, reformer, philosopher, land surveyor. Walden remains his most famous work, the account of his two years “in the woods” at Walden Pond, a lake in Concord, Massachusetts. He was profoundly influenced by the transcendentalist thinker and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, friend, mentor and owner of the land where he built his lakeside cabin.

Transcendentalism grew from English and German Romanticism, invigorating and broadening its ideals of human perfectibility. Thoreau’s poem, written in the early 1840s, reveals additional roots. The title abbreviates Sic vita est hominum – “man’s life is thus” – and refers to the eponymous poem by Henry King. King was a friend of John Donne and Ben Jonson and his graceful little praise song to flowers suggests another possible source. Thoreau’s reading clearly went back further than the celandines and daffodils of Wordsworth. He sets himself a challenge with Sic Vita, but works his way beyond what might risk being a young man’s narcissistic metaphysical pastiche, extending the “cut flowers” symbolism to an intense statement of his own truth.

The metaphor doesn’t arrive fully formed until the second stanza, although it’s hinted in some slightly off-key diction in the first. Persevere, and the speaker’s keenly felt dislocation finds its workable image. Theological concerns are secondary. Thoreau’s images are based on earthbound observation. The cut flowers are “arranged” in their vase with a certain aesthetic awareness, which only emphasises the artificiality imposed on them: “A bunch of violets without their roots, / And sorrel intermixed, / Encircled by a wisp of straw / Once coiled about their shoots.” The speaker’s turmoil and sense of pointless entrapment, focused by the first stanza, and poignantly returning in the fourth, suggest an uncomfortable prelude to self-discovery. Thoreau was to abandon poetry, and find less constrained forms of thought and existence. Sic Vita contains the blueprint of his development.

Although the note of personal pessimism returns in the last line of the poem, the ecologist has won the argument with the melancholy Romantic. He knows that the stock from which the violets were cut hasn’t been terminally damaged by the pruning, but strengthened. It’s a shift of perspective in the metaphorical narrative which sees that human interference in nature may be positive, or at least that to view it as inescapably negative would be sentimental. Scientific thinking becomes the poem’s saving grace, the practical transcendentalism that is the core of Thoreau’s genius.

He devoted serious thought to the definition of poetry. “No definition,” he wrote, “is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician’s. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.”

Sic Vita has mysterious origins: it was apparently “written on a sheet of paper wrapped round a bunch of violets, tied loosely with a straw, and thrown into the window of a friend”. It was read at Thoreau’s funeral by his friend, the writer and reformer Bronson Alcott, father of the novelist Louisa May.