Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Thoreau's work provides an interesting offering to the works that we have read thus far in this course. He is evoking many of the themes that we have noted in previous romantic works; however, his non-European perspective and setting provides for a radically different manifestation of these tropes.  Thoreau evokes an empirical tone when talking about the Nature that is around him. He takes great pains to take note of the named places, the specific length and depth of the rivers, the extent of their rise and fall over the seasons, and the local histories as collected through the townspeople and newspapers. This detailed focus, similar to what was seen in the travel narratives that were popularized over a century before, is oddly conflated with pastoral/idyllic tropes that celebrate the classic notions of a natural ideal. Furthermore, these figurations seem to be evoked by Thoreau strictly as a meditative means; the rivers are a channel through which Thoreau can expand upond a larger human/natural context that is largely concerned with matters of the soul. Essentially, to me, Thoreau's work resembles many canonical romantic works through the conventional forms he evokes; however, the content is clearly concerned with man's spiritual navigation and discovery. Nature seems to offer little more than an entry point for Thoreau's mourning of his brother. Because of this named and numbered distraction, Thoreau's figuration of nature seems disconnected from the first generation Romantics' concerns. Nature reads as a theoretical stand-in for the philosophical constructions of a soul's journey after death.