A Book of the Seasons: August 28.

August 28.

The acorns show now 

on the shrub oaks. A cool, white,

autumnal evening.
August 28, 1853

along the river

now bright blue china-colored

berries show themselves

August 28, 1856

The poet is a man

who lives at last

by watching his moods.

August 28, 1851

Bright china-colored

blue berries now show themselves

along the river.

August 28, 1856

A cool white

autumnal

evening.

August 28, 1853

A great deal of light

reflected through clearer air

a vein of coolness.

August 28, 1854

A clear flashing air

 shorn fields bright yellow and cool  –

bobolinks, goldfinch.

August 28, 1859

The sky overcast.
A sudden vivid green blaze
of reflected light.
August 28, 1860

August 28, 2014

A great poet will write for his peers alone, and indite no line to an inferior. He will 275remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and calmly expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely.

. . .

The art which only gilds the surface and demands merely a superficial polish, without reaching to the core, is but varnish and filigree. But the work of genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it anticipates the lapse of time and has an ingrained polish, which still appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality of its substance. 

Its beauty is its strength. It breaks with a lustre, and splits in cubes and diamonds. Like the diamond, it has only to be cut to be polished, and its surface is a window to its interior splendors.

True verses are not counted on the poet's fingers, but on his heart-strings.

My life hath been the poem I would have writ,

But I could not both live and live to utter it.

August 28, 1841

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 © 2009-2020