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Walden by henry david thoreau about
Walden by henry david thoreau about
Thoreau's Walden Analysis
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All through out Henry David Thoreau’s life his works have been rhetorically significant, in his piece Walden which was written in 1854 you can see what kind of strategical moves that me makes. In chapter 8, The Village, of Walden Thoreau uses many strategies to get his stories of what happened in the town to the reader, he uses rhetorical moves, appeals, and also figurative language which was tied into how he used his words. Rhetorically, Thoreau has different ways of speaking that shows he purpose and goal for his writing. Thoreau included a link to an old story about Orpheus, a man who was a sailor who traveled through the sirens that would try to lure him in and kill him. The situation that this context was in was how Thoreau would flee from the town to escape the temptations that were around him. This links purpose was to provide a simile that would further explain what Thoreau would do to get out of that town at the moment. It helps to make his point stronger, because everyone had heard of the stories of the sirens trying to …show more content…
Thoreau used the words “run the gauntlet” this in context means that he had to have a critical eye for everything that he saw around. The interesting part of this phrase is that it is also used in time of battle when the two fronts are ready to go against each other and lined up facing towards one another, and in the text Thoreau mentions right before about how all the houses are lined up on the sides of the street facing each other watch Thoreau as he goes past. Thoreau also when talking about walking through the darkness said “when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife” this statement had given personification to the darkness, in this it gives an idea as to how dark it gets at night when he walks in Thoreau’s perspective. Thoreau uses figurative language, words with more meaning, and much more to go more in depth about his
Thoreau uses figurative language to show how people stress about many problems in their lives and that it makes their lives difficult. For example, he states “Let us spend one day as deliberately as nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.” He compares nutshell and mosquito to irritating problems we have that we get thrown off by. He wants us to take all the junk that we don’t need out of us and focus more on living life without stress. In addition, he also mentions “In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for that a man has to live.” In this text, Thoreau uses a huge metaphor to explain
Thoreau talks about the politics, power and civil disobedience in his works. He believed that when many thought alike, the power was stronger within that minority. I think that Thoreau's intention was to point out that those people who dare to go against what seems to be unjust and go against the majority, and stand erect, are the people who transform society as a whole.
Harton, Ron. "Henry Thoreau as a Model for Nature Writing." 9 August 2009. The Thoreau Reader. Online Document. 17 March 2014. .
... which represents how fleeting time is. Thoreau is aware that the time he has been given is so very limited, especially compared to an eternity, but like the river, time will go on even if he isn’t alive to witness it. “I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.” Compared to where he was in his life when he wrote this, when he was born there was a lot less to be concerned about. Babies are able to live the simple life which Thoreau desires. When we’re young we don’t possess as much of the knowledge as we do when we get older, our intellect can be compared to time. As we grow older we gain more knowledge, the two go hand in hand, but when we are young we aren’t wise so nothing is troublesome, which is why Thoreau says he wishes he was as wise as he was when he was born, life is never as simple as it was the moment you were born.
Thoreau and MLK use many similar strategies in their writings. One uses these strategies to make their piece more effective, in my observations of the two writing I come to realize MLK's persuasive letter, Letter from Birmingham Jail was far more effective than Thoreau’s Lecture On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, and here is why. MLK’s article was more effective because he strives towards tugging on the audience's heartstrings rather than the logical side, his repetition was used more effective, and he refers back to his audience. Also, because MLK stayed more on topic and was more passionate about his piece, made his writing a more effective disquisition.
In Thoreau’s view, he felt that the government was insufficient. He didn’t need the laws to be just, he used his conscious and morality. He was compelled to do what morally was right, rather than it being based on government issued laws such as the complacent society there is today. People seem to care about justice, yet are immoral. This was the message Thoreau was trying to get across.
For example, “Our life is like a German Confederacy, made of up petty states,with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment.” (page 277). The German Confederacy was a group created to try to unify states. After the French Revolution things in europe got hectic. By creating the German Confederacy they tried to make everything easier and bring things back to order, but it ended up causing more of a problem. By using this simile, Thoreau was saying that life is much more complicated than it has to be. He gives the feeling of being ludicrous. That people complicate their lives with little things that don’t really matter much to the bigger picture. Another example in the text is, “ Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.” (page 280). What Thoreau is saying is the we should spend one day just being, as in living life without complications. Spend one day not getting off track and making it complicated by little things that don’t matter. Thoreau uses similes to compare life of humans to simpler things to show that we too, do not have to be complicated. But yet we are so he uses similes to clarify his
His attitudes help decipher his meanings and intentions of informing about philosophy as they give a more specific innuendo as to what he wants the reader to understand from what he’s saying. However, it’s quite difficult to narrow down what type of people Thoreau can intellectually connect with, because he doesn’t take the time to get to know them personally, which can be hard to follow. But, his applications of literary devices made it broad enough for anyone to be able to see his perspective and opinions and understand enough to be able to see it themselves in their daily
When it comes to civil rights, there are two pieces of literature commonly discussed. One of these pieces is Henry David Thoreau’s persuasive lecture On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. In this work, Thoreau discusses how one must combat the government with disobedience of unjust laws and positive friction to create change. The second piece is the commonly known article Letter From a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr. This letter covers the ways in which peaceful protest and standing up against injustice can lead to positive results. Both pieces conveyed a similar message of standing up for what is right. The strongest rhetorical methods which Thoreau uses are allusions, logos, ethos and rhetorical questions. However, King’s use of
Civil Disobedience makes governments more accountable for their actions and has been an important catalyst for overcoming unpopular government policies. To voice his disgust with slavery, in 1849 Henry David Thoreau published his essay, Civil Disobedience, arguing that citizens must not allow their government to override their principles and have a civic duty to prevent their government from using unjust means to ends. The basis for Thoreau’s monumental essay was his refusal to pay a poll tax, which subsequently landed him a night in county jail. In his passage: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine...
I awoke before the first rays of sunlight had passed through the dew-covered trees to the west today. It had rained the evening before, and the smell of wet leaves and grass was still lingering in the air.
As one of the most well-known authors of the nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau wrote and inspired many poetic works we recognize as “classics”. He lived during the height of transcendentalism and eventually became a major contributor to its cause. Thoreau accomplished this magnificent feat through his short writings and his poetry. As such a significant writer in American literature, Thoreau, like any great writer, explored many topics and ideas in his work such as religion, and nature. Among the most consistent of these topics seems to be that he as an author, appeals to a higher law, or greater power in many of his works. Throughout his poems “Nature,” “Great God I Ask for no Meaner Pelf,” and “On Fields O’re Which the Reaper has Passed” Thoreau blatantly references God or other supernatural forces, giving way to his sense of style, and ideology.
Pathos is prevalent throughout Thoreau’s essay. He uses pathos in an attempt to persuade his readers into making a logical and ethical choice. The essay as a whole is an attempt to anger the reader into taking action against what Thoreau sees as an unjust government. When he refers to “the mass of men” who are in service to the country, the soldiers, as being the “same worth only as horse and dogs” and of serving “the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines...
Thoreau went into the woods for many different reasons than McCandless. He decided to live in the woods so he could live deliberately. He desired to learn what life had to teach him and face only the essential facts of life without any other distractions. Going into the woods, would let him know that he had lived, so when he died, he wouldn’t regret never fully living. He wanted to figure out if this life in nature was mean or sublime. If it was mean, he hoped to publish his findings to the world, but if it was sublime, he would just know this knowledge and use it for his next excursion. Thoreau heavily believed in simplicity. He felt everything should be simplified, and that people were squandered by details. As he said, “ Simplicity, simplicity,
Why do so few Americans not see all of the problems in society? Do they simply not care or are they not able to see them? With Thoreau's statement, "To be awake is to be alive", he implies that Americans have their eyes closed to these issues. They do not choose to overlook these issues but they simply pass them by because their eyes are shut. Some people are not able to grasp the concept in Thoreau's statement and find it to be foreign or subversive because it threatens the way the see the world.