A reverie

April 6.

April 6, 2019

A still warmer day than yesterday — a warm, moist rain-smelling west wind. 

Up Assabet. I am surprised to find so much of the white maples already out. The light-colored stamens show to some rods. They resound with the hum of honey-bees, heard a dozen rods off, and you see thousands of them about the flowers against the sky. They know where to look for the white maple and when. 

This susurrus carries me forward some months toward summer -- to those still warm summer noons when the breams' nests are left dry, and the fishes retreat from the shallows into the cooler depths, and the cows stand up to their bellies in the river. The reminiscence comes over me like a summer's dream.

Hear the snipe over the meadows this evening.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 6, 1854

They resound with the hum of honey-bees. See April 6, 1853 ("The air resounds with the hum of honey-bees, attracted by the flower of the skunk cabbage.") See also  April 1, 1852 ('' Saw the first bee of the season on the railroad causeway,"); April 1, 1858 ("The white maples are abundantly out to-day. . . .surprised to hear the resounding hum of honey-bees, which are busy about them,"); April 1, 1860 ("Hear the hum of bees on the maples.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Bees

They know where to look for the white maple and when. See September 30, 1852 ("How well they know the woods and fields and the haunt of every flower! If there are any sweet flowers still lingering on the hillside, it is known to the bees both of the forest and the village."); March 18, 1860 ("There is but one flower in bloom in the town, and this insect knows where to find it."); April 6, 1853 ("Notice a white maple with almost all the staminate flowers above or on the top, most of the stamens now withered, before the red maple has blossomed.): April 6, 1855 ( "A very few white maple stamens stand out already loosely enough to blow in the wind.").  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, White maple buds and flowers

This susurrus carries me forward some months toward summer. See April 3, 1858 ("There is no pause to the hum of the bees all this warm day. It is a very simple but pleasing and soothing sound, this susurrus, thus early in the spring.");  April 17, 1859 ("In the lee of this bush, and your charmed ears may hear this faint susurrus weaving the web of summer."); July 16, 1852 ("The tree resounds with the hum of bees . . . a perfect susurrus, a sound unlike any other in nature, not like the wind, as that is like the sea.")

Hear the snipe over the meadows this evening. See April 9, 1858 (" I hear the booming of snipe this evening, and Sophia says she heard them on the 6th. The meadows having been bare so long, they may have begun yet earlier. Persons walking up or down our village street in still evenings at this season hear this singular winnowing sound in the sky over the meadows and know not what it is") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Snipe.

April 6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, April 6

A still warmer day

than yesterday — a warm, moist

rain-smelling west wind

white maples resound 

with the hum of honey-bees 

like a summer dream.

they know where

to look for the white maple

and when.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024

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