Monday, July 16, 2012

A perfect susurrus.



July 16.

The bass on Conantum is a very rich sight now, a solid mass of verdure and of flowers with its massed and rounded outline.  Its twigs are drooping, weighed down with pendulous flowers.  When you stand directly under it and look up, you see one mass of flowers, a flowery canopy.  Its conspicuous leaf-like bracts, too, have the effect of flowers. The tree resounds with the hum of bees, -- bumblebees and honey-bees; rose-bugs and butterflies, also, are here,-- a perfect susurrus, a sound unlike any other in nature, not like the wind, as that is like the sea.

This is a still thoughtful day, the air full of vapors which shade the earth, preparing rain for the morrow. The air is full of sweetness. The tree is full of poetry.

H. D.  Thoreau, Journal, July 16, 1852

The tree resounds with the hum of bees, . . . a perfect susurrus, a sound unlike any other in nature See July 11, 1852; ("The bass on Conantum is now well in blossom. It probably commenced about the 9th. Its flowers are conspicuous for a tree, and a rather agreeable odor fills the air. The tree resounds with the hum of bees on the flowers. On the whole it is a rich sight.”);  July 17, 1854 (" I was surprised by the loud humming of bees, etc., etc., in the bass tree; thought it was a wind rising at first. Methinks none of our trees attract so many.") July 17, 1856 ("Hear at distance the hum of bees from the bass with its drooping flowers at the Island, a few minutes only before sunset. It sounds like the rumbling of a distant train of cars.”); July 18, 1854 ("At a little distance it is like the sound of a waterfall or of the cars; close at hand like a factory full of looms. . . .You will know if you pass within a few rods of a bass tree at this season in any part of the town, by this loud murmur, like a water fall, which proceeds from it.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Basswood;






No comments:

Post a Comment

Popular Posts Last 30 Days.

The week ahead in Henry’s journal

The week ahead in Henry’s journal
A journal, a book that shall contain a record of all your joy.
"A stone fruit. Each one yields me a thought." ~ H. D. Thoreau, March 28, 1859


I sit on this rock
wrestling with the melody
that possesses me.