That grand old poem called Winter is round again

December 7

Sunday. P. M. — Take my first skate to Fair Haven Pond. 

It takes my feet a few moments to get used to the skates. I see the track of one skater who has preceded me this morning. This is the first skating. I keep mostly to the smooth ice about a rod wide next the shore commonly, where there was an overflow a day or two ago. There is not the slightest overflow to-day, and yet it is warm (thermometer at 25 at 4.30 p. m.). It must be that the river is falling. 

Now I go shaking over hobbly places, now shoot over a bridge of ice only a foot wide between the water and the shore at a bend, — Hubbard Bath, — always so at first there. Now I suddenly see the trembling surface of water where I thought were black spots of ice only around me. 

The river is rather low, so that I cannot keep the river above the Clamshell Bend. I am confined to a very narrow edging of ice in the meadow, gliding with unexpected ease through withered sedge, but slipping sometimes on a twig; again taking to the snow to reach the next ice, but this rests my feet; straddling the bare black willows, winding between the button-bushes, and following narrow threadings of ice amid the sedge, which bring me out to clear fields unexpectedly. 

Occasionally I am obliged to take a few strokes over black and thin-looking ice, where the neighboring bank is springy, and am slow to acquire confidence in it, but, returning, how bold I am! 

Where the meadow seemed only sedge and snow, I find a complete ice connection. 

At Cardinal Shore, as usual, there is a great crescent of hobbly ice, where, two or three days ago, the northwest wind drove the waves back up-stream and broke up the edge of the ice. This crescent is eight or ten rods wide and twice as many long, and consists of cakes of ice from a few inches to half a dozen feet in diameter, with each a raised edge all around, where apparently the floating sludge has been caught and accumulated. (Occasionally the raised edge is six inches high!) This is mottled black and white, and is not yet safe. It is like skating over so many rails, or the edges of saws. 

Now I glide over a field of white air-cells close to the surface, with coverings no thicker than egg-shells, cutting through with a sharp crackling sound. There are many of those singular spider-shaped dark places amid the white ice, where the surface water has run through some days ago. 

As I enter on Fair Haven Pond, I see already three pickerel-fishers retreating from it, drawing a sled through the Baker Farm, and see where they have been fishing, by the shining chips of ice about the holes. 

Others were here even yesterday, as it appears. The pond must have been frozen by the 4th at least. 

Some fisherman or other is ready with his reels and bait as soon as the ice will bear, whether it be Saturday or Sunday. Theirs, too, is a sort of devotion, though it be called hard names by the preacher, who perhaps could not endure the cold and wet any day. Perhaps he dines off their pickerel on Monday at the hotel. 

The ice appears to be but three or four inches thick. 

That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine. As I sit under Lee's Cliff, where the snow is melted, amid sere pennyroyal and frost-bitten catnep, I look over my shoulder upon an arctic scene. 

I see with surprise the pond a dumb white surface of ice speckled with snow, just as so many winters before, where so lately were lapsing waves or smooth reflecting water. 

I see the holes which the pickerel-fisher has made, and I see him, too, retreating over the hills, drawing his sled behind him. The water is already skimmed over again there. I hear, too, the familiar belching voice of the pond. 

It seemed as if winter had come without any interval since midsummer, and I was prepared to see it flit away by the time I again looked over my shoulder. It was as if I had dreamed it. 

But I see that the farmers have had time to gather their harvests as usual, and the seasons have revolved as slowly as in the first autumn of my life. 

The winters come now as fast as snowflakes. It is wonderful that old men do not lose their reckoning. It was summer, and now again it is winter. Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it. 

So sweet and wholesome is the winter, so simple and moderate, so satisfactory and perfect, that her children will never weary of it. What a poem! an epic in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes. It is solid beauty. 

It has been subjected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the gods, and not a single superfluous ornament remains. The severest and coldest of the immortal critics have shot their arrows at and pruned it till it cannot be amended. 

The swamp white oak leaves are like the shrub oak in having two colors above and beneath. They are considerably curled, so as to show their silvery lining, though firm. Hardy and handsome, with a fair silver winter lining. 

Am pleased to see the holes where men have dug for money, since they remind me that some are dreaming still like children, though of impracticable things, — dreaming of finding money, and trying to put their dream in practice. It proves that men live Arabian nights and days still. I would they should have even that kind of faith than none at all. If any silly or abominable or superstitious practice ever prevailed among any savage race, just that may be repeated in the most civilized society to-day. 

You will see full-grown woods where the oaks and pines or birches are separated by right lines, growing in squares or other rectilinear figures, because different lots were cut at different times.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 7, 1856


Take my first skate to Fair Haven Pond. See  December 6, 1854 ("I see thick ice and boys skating all the way to Providence, but know not when it froze, I have been so busy writing my lecture.");  December 13, 1859 ("My first true winter walk is perhaps that which I take on the river, or where I cannot go in the summer. . . . Now that the river is frozen we have a sky under our feet also."); December 14, 1850 ("I walk on Loring's Pond to three or four islands there which I have never visited, not having a boat in the summer."); December 14. 1851 ("The boys have been skating for a week, but I have had no time to skate for surveying. I have hardly realized that there was ice, though I have walked over it about this business."): December 15, 1855 ("The boys have skated. a little within two or three days, but it has not been thick enough to bear a man yet."); December 19, 1854 (" Last night was so cold that the river closed up almost everywhere, and made good skating where there had been no ice to catch the snow of the night before."); December 20, 1854 ( P. M. — Skate to Fair Haven.”)

The winters come now as fast as snowflakes. It was summer, and now again it is winter. See July 19, 1851 ("Yesterday it was spring, and to-morrow it will be autumn. Where is the summer then?”) Compare January 24, 1858 ("Between winter and summer there is, to my mind, an immeasurable interval.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, As the Seasons Revolve

That grand old poem called Winter is round again . . . See December 5, 1856 ("I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold,");  December 8, 1850 ( "The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible!"); December 11, 1855 ("The winter, with its snow and ice, . . . is as it was designed and made to be."); December 20, 1854 ("It has been a glorious winter day, its elements so simple . . ."); December 21, 1855 ("A few simple colors now prevail.”)

You will see full-grown woods where the oaks and pines or birches are separated by right lines. See October 16, 1860 ("I observe at a distance an oak wood- lot some twenty years old, with a dense narrow edging of pitch pines . . . I understand it and read its history easily before I get to it.")

December 7. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, December 7

That grand old poem

called Winter is round again –

Nature loves this rhyme.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, That grand old poem called Winter

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

tinyurl.com/HDT561207

Revisiting nests.

July 19.

P. M. — Marlborough Road via railroad and Dugan wood-lot. 

A box tortoise, killed a good while, on the railroad, at Dogwood Swamp; quite dry now. This the fourth I have ever found: first one, alive, in Truro; second one, dead, on shore of Long Pond, Lakeville; third one, alive, under Fair Haven Hill; and fourth, this. 

This appeared to have been run over, but both upper and under shells were broken into several pieces each, in no case on the line of the serrations or of the edges of the scales (proving that they are as strong one way as the other), but at various angles across them, which, I think, proves it to have been broken while the animal was alive or fresh and the shell not dry. I picked up only the after half or two thirds and one foot. The upper shell was at the widest place four and three eighths inches. It was broken irregularly across the back, from about the middle of the second lateral scale from the front on the left to the middle of the third lateral on the right, and was, at the angle of the marginal scales, about sixteen fortieths to seventeen fortieths of an inch thick, measured horizontally. The sides under the lateral scales and half the dorsal were from four to five fortieths of an inch thick. The thinnest part was about three eighths of an inch from middle of back on each side, directly between the spring of the sides [?], where it was but little more than two fortieths thick. So nature makes an arch. 

I have about half the sternum, the rear of it at one point reaching to the hinge. It is thickest vertically just at the side hinges, where it is one fourth thick; thinnest three eighths from this each side, where it is one eighth thick; and thence thickens to the middle of the sternum, where it [is] seven and a half fortieths thick. 

The upper shell in this case (vide May 17, 1856) is neither pointed nor notched behind, but quite straight. The sternum and the lower parts of the marginal scales are chiefly dark-brown. The marking above is sufficiently like that of the Cape Cod specimen, with a still greater proportion of yellow, now faded to a yellowish brown. 

On Linnaea Hills, sarsaparilla berries. 

Lobelia inflata, perhaps several days; little white glands (?) on the edges of the leaves. On the under side of a Lobelia spicata leaf, a sort of loose-spun cocoon, about five eighths of an inch long, of golden-brown silk, beneath which silky mist a hundred young spiders swarm. 

Examined painted tortoise eggs of June 10th. One of those great spider(?)-holes made there since then, close to the eggs. The eggs are large and rather pointed, methinks at the larger end. The young are half developed. 

Fleets of yellow butterflies on road. 

Small white rough-coated puffballs (?) in pastures. Appear not to have two coats like that of Potter's Path, q. v. 

As I come by the apple tree on J. P. B.'s land, where I heard the young woodpeckers hiss a month or so ago, I now see that they have flown, for there is a cobweb over the hole. 

Plucked a handful of gooseberries at J. P. B.'s bush, probably ripe some time. It is of fair size, red-purple and greenish, and apparently like the first in garden, except it is not slightly bristly like that, nor has so much flavor and agreeable tartness. Also the stalk is not so prickly, but for the most part has one small prickle where ours has three stout ones. Our second gooseberry is more purple (or dark-purple with bloom) and the twig less prickly than the wild. Its flavor is insipid and in taste like the wild. 

It is the Hypericum ellipticum and Canadense (linear- leaved) whose red pods are noticed now. 

On the sand thrown out by the money-diggers, I found the first ripe blackberries thereabouts. The heat reflected from the sand had ripened them earlier than elsewhere. It did not at first occur to me what sand it was, nor that I was indebted to the money-diggers, or their Moll Pitcher who sent them hither, for these blackberries. I am probably the only one who has got any fruit out of that hole. It 's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. 

Looking up, I observed that they had dug another hole a rod higher up the hill last spring (for the blackberries had not yet spread over it), and had partly filled it up again. So the result of some idler's folly and some spiritualist's nonsense is that I get my blackberries a few days the earlier. 

The downy woodpecker's nest which I got July 8th was in a dead and partly rotten upright apple bough four and three quarters inches [in] diameter. Hole perfectly elliptical (or oval) one and two sixteenths by one and five sixteenths inches ; whole depth below it eight inches. It is excavated directly inward about three and a half inches, with a conical roof, also arching at back, with a recess in one side on level with the hole, where the bird turns. Judging from an old hole in the same bough, directly above, it enlarges directly to a diameter of two and one fourth to two and one half inches, not in this case descending exactly in the middle of the bough, but leaving one side not a quarter of an inch thick. At the hole it is left one inch thick. At the nest it is about two and three eighths inches [in] diameter. 

I find nothing in the first but bits of rotten wood, remains of insects, etc., when I tip it up, — for I cannot see the bottom, — yet in the old one there is also quite a nest of fine stubble (?), bark shred (?), etc., mixed with the bits of rotten wood.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 19, 1856

Where I heard the young woodpeckers hiss a month or so ago . . . See June 10, 1856 ("In a hollow apple tree, hole eighteen inches deep, young pigeon woodpeckers, large and well feathered. They utter their squeaking hiss whenever I cover the hole with my hand, apparently taking it for the approach of the mother. A strong, rank fetid smell issues from the hole.")

Examined painted tortoise eggs of June 10th. See June 10, 1856 ("A painted tortoise laying her eggs ten feet from the wheel-track on the Marlborough road.")

The downy woodpecker's nest which I got July 8th was in a dead and partly rotten upright apple . . .  See July 8, 1856 ("Got the downy woodpecker’s nest, some days empty.”)

Lobelia inflata, perhaps several days; little white glands (?) on the edges of the leaves. See July 17, 1852 ("Lobelia inflata, Indian-tobacco""); ; August 20, 1851 ("The Lobelia inflata, Indian-tobacco, meets me at every turn. At first I suspect some new bluish flower in the grass, but stooping see the inflated pods. Tasting one such herb convinces me that there are such things as drugs which may either kill or cure")

Fleets of yellow butterflies on road. See July 26, 1854 ("Today I see in various parts of the town the yellow butterflies in fleets in the road, on bare damp sand, twenty or more collected within a diameter of five or six inches in many places.") and July 14, 1852 ("See to-day for the first time this season fleets of yellow butterflies in compact assembly in the road...")

It is the Hypericum ellipticum and Canadense (linear- leaved) whose red pods are noticed now. See July 24, 1853 ("The small linear leaved hypericum (H. Canadense) shows red capsules.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)