CHANTICLEER

WALDEN TITLEPAGE

WALDEN: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to bragas lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost,if only to wake my neighbors up.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHANTICLEER

PEOPLE OFWALDEN

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The purpose of this file is to point out that there are all sortsof directions in which Henry Thoreau could have taken the“Chanticleer” trope which he used at the beginning of WALDEN, andthat in taking this trope in the direction of alertness Thoreauwas passing up, bypassing, shunning, opportunities to build thistrope instead in the direction of hostility and aggressivenessand territoriality. Consider for instance what use had been madeof the known territoriality of chickens in the era of theRevolutionary Father. When General George Washington wanted toencourage his militias to make use of what is termed “the cryof self-identification,” the war cry, in their attacks upon thecontinental troops operating in the Pennsylvania woodlands underDaniel Morgan, the Native American war-whoop model wasunavailable to him because by and large the Native Americantribes were allying themselves with the British against theColonials. So this war cry was analogized instead to theaggressiveness display of the chicken, and his men became known

WALDEN: The present was my next experiment of this kind which Ipurpose to describe more at length; for convenience, putting theexperience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not proposeto write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily aschanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wakemy neighbors up.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHANTICLEER

PEOPLE OFWALDEN

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to themselves as “the blue hen’s chicks.”

For instance, after the successful battle at King’s Mountain, aTory who had managed to surrender and who had not afterward beenamong the prisoners executed by the Colonial militias wanted tobe able to understand how this rabble had defeated thedisciplined troops of Colonel Ferguson. The patriot replied tohim “But we are all of us blue hen’s chickens.”

In Captain David Vance’s NARRATIVE OF THE BATTLE OF KINGS MOUNTAIN(Greensboro NC: Schenck, 1891) we find:

Whereupon David Knox jumped on a pile of firewood in thestreet, slapped his hands and thighs, and crowed like acock, exclaiming “Day is at hand!”

In Robert Henry’s NARRATIVE OF THE BATTLE OF COWAN’S FORD (GreensboroNC: Schenck, 1891) we find:

We were the bravest of the brave; we were a formidableset of blue hen’s chickens of the game blood, ofindomitable courage, and strangers to fear. We were wellprovided with sticks; we made the egg shells —Britishand Tory skulls— fly, like onion peelings on a windyday; the blue cocks flapped their wings and crowed — “weare all for Liberty these times!”; and all was over; ourequals were scarce, and our superiors hard to find.

Chanticleer: Young David Henry Thoreau had kept some chickensin the large garden in back of the Monroe house at the cornerof Maine Street and Academy Lane in Concord, while the fourThoreau children had been living with their parents in whatbefore 1835 had been the home of Lemuel Shattuck (the Monroehouse had trees, the house of Deacon William Parkman in whichthe Thoreaus lived from 1837 to 1844 lacked them and lacked spacefor chickens). It was this Monroe house that had the “Gothicwindow” which Thoreau recollected in 1835. Among the leaves ofthe WALDEN manuscript for the “Village” chapter has been found aleaf which was omitted in the volume as it went to press:

When I kept hens once in the Village, I remember thereone white rooster in one of the broods I reared, thatwent much by himself, — a stately-faced young cockerel,that still had a good deal of the pheasant in him. Thenote of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly mostremarkable. One night he was by chance shut out of thehen-yard, and after long reconnoitering and anxiousgoing and coming, — with brave thoughts exalting him,and fancies rushing thick upon him, — crowing long,memoriter-wise [sic] of his Indian origin and wilddescent, — he flew, bird-like, up into a tree and wentto roost there. And I, who had witnessed this passagein his private history, forthwith wrote these verses and

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inscribed them to him: —

Poor bird! destined to lead thy life Far in the adventurous West, And here to be debarred to-night From thy accustomed nest:

Did Heaven bestow its quenchless inner light So long ago, for thy small want to-night? Why stand’st upon thy toes to crow so late?

The Moon is deaf to thy low, feathered fate.Or dost thou think so to possess the Night,And people the drear dark with thy brave sprite? [sic]

I fear, imprisonment has spoiled thy wit, Or ingrained servitude extinguished it? But no, — dim memory of the days of yore By Brahmapootra and the Jumna’s shore, Where thy proud voice flew swiftly o’er the heath, And sought thy food the jungle’s shade beneath, Has taught thy wing to seek yon friendly trees, As erst by Indian banks of far Ganges.

This sort of battle crying would be preserved in the Americansouth and is probably the origin of something which would becarried forward decade after decade in “Southern humor” andwould reappear in a later contest being referred to as thedistinctive (yet unrecorded) “rebel yell.”

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This drawing, of course, is of Chanticleer, and was Thoreau’sintended frontispiece for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS:

In addition to all this, there is the distinct probability thatThoreau’s choice was influenced at least in part by:

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A family coat of arms was granted to Thomas Alcocke,1 made up of the device “three cocks emblematic of watchfulness,” and the motto “Semper vigilans”2 — which is an interesting aside on Thoreau’s use of Chanticleer in the epigraph for WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, and his original desire to use a drawing of a rooster on the title page rather than a drawing of the cabin, for Amos Bronson Alcox would among others be a descendant of this Alcocke family and as the text makes clear, this older man had been a frequent visitor at the cabin and during this period had been a great influence upon Henry Thoreau.

Here’s something I am currently finding amusing — for what it’s worth. The leaves of Thoreau’s initial WALDEN manuscript, from which he would lecture, would employ the 19th-Century polite term “rooster”; however, in 1849 while he would still be going around to the lyceums of various New England towns giving readings from what would become the various earlier chapters, at some point he would line out “rooster” and substitute the 19th-Century rude terms “cock” and “cockerel.” Thoreau would leave his manuscript that way, and when after its 8 drafts and 11 years of gestation his book would finally get published in 1854, the polite word “rooster” would still have been replaced by the impolite “cock” and “cockerel.” This in the America in

1616

1. Doctor George Alcock, a physician who would settle in Roxbury, with his brother Thomas, would come over in the fleet with Winthrop in 1630. Dr. Alcock would represent at the first court on May 14, 1634. Francis Alcock would come over in the Bevis in 1638 at the age of 26. Samuel Alcock, who would settle in Kittery in 1652 and become a freeman of Massachusetts.2. “Arms—Gules a fesse between three cocks’ heads erased argent, braked and crested or.”

“Crest—A cock ermine braked and membered or.”“Motto—Vigilate.”

THE ALCOTT FAMILY

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which the young Amos Bronson Alcox had seen fit to change his family name to Alcott because of the “all-cocks” jokes he had been having to put up with. Isn’t it interesting, that Thoreau would flaunt his “cock” in the face of this contemporary usage? Background on these 19th-Century usages and polite conventions can come to us from pages 38-43 of Peter Fryer’s MRS. GRUNDY: STUDIES IN ENGLISH PRUDERY (1963), from which I will here quote at length:

The commonest demotic words for the male sex organ, prick (fromOld English prica, “point” or “dot”) and cock (from Old Englishcocc) date back in written sources to the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries respectively. The former has been avulgarism since the eighteenth century, the latter since about1830 (somewhat earlier in the USA). Both words were suggestedpunningly by Shakespeare. “The bawdy hand of the dial is nowupon the prick of noon”, says Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet [circa1595]; “Pistol’s cock is up, / And flashing fire will I follow,says Pistol in King Henry V [circa 1599]. Florio, in his Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes (1598), renders coglintoas “one that hath a good prick.” “The main Spring’s weaken’dthat holds up his cock,” says a servant to Sulpitia, Mistressof the Male Stewes about a Dane exhausted in her service, inFletcher and Massinger’s play The Custom of the Country(composed between 1619 and 1622).The word cock seems to have had a specially strong aura inAmerica, where, as the polite term for a male domestic fowl,rooster (1772) became cock of the walk early in the nineteenthcentury; it has remained so to this day. Bache protestedenergetically, but unavailingly:

Why ... should we substitute rooster for cock? Does notthe hen of the same species roost also? We say woodcock,peacock, weathercock,—although some persons object tothese,—why, then, should we not use the distinctive namefrom which the compounds are derived? ... Or shall weread, where Peter denies the Master— “the rooster crew”?The word rooster is an Americanism, which, the soonerwe forget, the better.

De Vere quotes an anonymous Englishman who professed to haveheard a rooster and ox (i.e., cock and bull) story in the UnitedStates. But even rooster was considered somewhat advanced; oneNew York boarding-house keeper preferred barn-door he-biddy, andgamechicken (1846) and crower (1891) were quite frequent.Roaches started to oust American cockroaches in the 1820s;haystacks began to replace haycocks in the same decade; by 1859cockchafers were being called chafers; and a young woman tellsJudge Haliburton’s Sam Slick (1838) that her brother is arooster swain in the navy! It is, on the whole, surprising thatthe USA was the home of a drink called a cocktail (one colloquialEnglish meaning of which is “whore”). But these changes were notall. What Bartlett in 1877 called the “mock modesty of theWestern States” required that a male turkey should be called—agentleman turkey.In comparison with the plain words prick and cock, such

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expressions as member (circa 1290), privy member (1297),genitals (1390), privy parts (1556), pudenda (1634), penis(1693), arbor vitae (1732), tree of life (1732), means ofgeneration (1791), genitalia (1876), private parts (1885),(male) organ, and sex sound distinctly emasculate. So do themore literary euphemisms—catso (the 17th Century and the early18th; from the Italian cazzo), gadso (late 17th Century to mid-l8th; cf. catso; used in Dickens as an interjection), cypriansceptre, mentule, priap, and thyrsus—and also the colloquial(but still respectable) ones: thing (Century 17), (matrimonial)peacemaker (mid-18th Century), private property (the 19thCentury), affair (the 19th Century), it (the 19th Century),concern (circa 1840), Athenaeum or the A (before 1903),thingummy (the 20th Century), contrivance, privates, andprivities. Less so, perhaps, Rochester’s rector of the females,or champion of women’s rights, or nakedness, or phallus. But thefeebleness, or archness, of most of these terms is more thancompensated for by a wealth of popular synonyms —THE SLANG OFVENERY lists about 600— both euphemistic and dysphemistic, whichreflect the unquenchable verbal inventiveness, sexual vigour andpride (and, to a certain extent, cynicism) of Englishmen overseveral centuries.These synonyms fall into five main groups. First, there arewords —colloquialisms or slang terms— which refer to the bodilyposition, appearance, or shape of the relaxed or tumescentpenis. The majority of words in this group seem euphemistic —though we must bear in mind that both euphemism and dysphemismare relative terms, depending on the context and on the degreeof social acceptability, in a specific milieu, of the plain wordwhich the chosen synonym is replacing. The position of the penisis indicated by such terms as middle finger (the 19th Century),middle leg (the 19th Century), middle stump (the 20th Century)and middle; best leg of three (the 19th Century); down-leg; andforeman. For the organ in detumescence there are tail (mid-Century 14; Standard English until the 18th Century) and suchcompounds as tail-pipe and tail-tree; flip-flap (circa 1650);flap-doodle (late 17th Century); lobcock (mid-18th Century);flapper (the 19th Century); dingle-dangle (circa 1895), and anursery term, worm. Two other nineteenth-century euphemisms ofthis kind are dropping member (especially if gonorrhoea’d) andhanging Johnny (especially if impotent or diseased). Littlefinger (the 20th Century) is a female euphemism. There is aseries of expressions likening the penis to a tool or machine-part or domestic article of some kind: tool itself (mid-Century16; Standard English until the 18th Century), master-tool, andinstrument; pen and pencil (late 19th Century); pin (the 17thCentury; used by Burns), tail-pin and needle (Standard Englishin the 18th Century); pump(-handle) (the 18th Century); horn(the 18th Century); key (the 18th Century); rod (the 18thCentury), rod of love and Aaron’s rod; copper-stick (the 19thCentury); pendulum (the 19th Century); pole (the 19th Century);button (the 19th Century; baby’s); spout (the 19th Century);

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pestle (the 19th Century); machine (the 19th Century); (k)nob(late 19th Century), broom-handle, broomstick, busk, candle,clothes-prop, cork, golden rivet, peg, spigot, sponge, andspindle. Other names come from the kitchen or the sweet shop:poperine-pear (late 16th Century to mid-17th; used byShakespeare); pudding (the 17th Century) and roly-poly (the 19thCentury); sugar-stick (late 18th Century) and lollipop (the 19thCentury); bone (mid-19th Century; Cockneys’), gristle (circa1850) and marrowbone (the 19th Century); banana, potato inger,radish, and (live) sausage. Others again, from the animalkingdom: nag (circa 1670-1750), cuckoo (the 19th Century;schoolboys’), mole (the 19th Century), mouse (the 19th Century),goose’s neck (circa 1872), winkle (late 19th Century; nurseryand schoolboys’), bird, goat, live rabbit, lobster, pony, snake,and trouser-snake. The penis is also euphemized into a prickle(circa 1550; Standard English), a pilgrim’s staff (the 18thCentury), a star-gazer (the 18th Century), a flute (the 18thCentury), living, one-holed, and silent flute (the latter, late18th Century-mid-19th) and a whistle, a pointer, a root (the19th Century) and an Irish root (circa 1830-1914), fiddle-bow(circa 1830), a stick, fiddle-stick (the 19th Century), adrumstick and a night stick, a sceptre (of authority), a tent-peg, and a yard. Among sailors it becomes a stern-post (mid-19thCentury) or a rudder; in the countryside a handstaff (circa1850). A whole armoury is drawn on: weapon itself (late 19thCentury); dirk (the 18th Century; Scots); pikestaff (the 18thCentury), pike of pleasure, and tail-pike; bow and (love’s)arrow; bayonet, cutlass, (murton) dagger, dart, nature’s scythe,sabre, spear, and spike; club (the 19th Century) and bludgeon;pistol (late 19th Century), fowling-piece, gun, and cutty-gun(Scots). Of the few dysphemisms in this group, three emphasizethe phenomenon of erection: bit of hard (the 19th Century),hard-lit, and bit of stiff (the 19th Century). The other is hairywheel (circa 1870).In the second group, euphemisms are heavily outnumbered; thisgroup contains words which refer, sometimes with gusto or withcrudity, to the sexual or reproductive or excretory functionsof the male sex organ. The euphemisms are lullaby (mid-19thCentury), badge (or label) of manhood, Cupid’s torch, bed-fellow, carnal part, guest, little lover, lodger, loveflesh,mark of the man, master of the ceremonies, object of enjoyment,ploughshare, sex’s pride, thorn in the flesh, and unruly member;cuckoldmaker (circa 1610); baby-maker (late 19th Century),child-getter, brat-getter, and life-preserver (circa 1840);pee-wee (the 19th Century; nursery), P-maker (mid-19th Century),waterworks (mid-19th Century), water-engine (late 19thCentury), and make-water. Many of the dysphemisms introduce intothe name of the male sex organ a more or less direct allusionto the female sex organ: trap-stick (1670-1900); plum-treeshaker (the 17th and 18th Centuries); tickle-tail (the 17thCentury); tickletoby (? the 17th to 19th Centuries), plug-tail(mid- 18th Century-mid-19th), tail-trimmer, and tenant-in-tail

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(punning upon the legal meaning of tail); quim-wedge (the 19thCentury), wedge, quim-stake (the 19th Century), crack-h(a)unter(the 19th Century), hunter, cracksman, cranny-h(a)unter, cunny-catcher, gap-stopper (the 19th Century), gullyraker, chink-stopper, and touch-trap; rump-splitter (circa 1560-1800), arse-opener, arse-wedge, bum-tickler, and claw-buttock; beard-splitter (the 18th Century-19), hair-splitter (circa 1810),hair-divider (circa 1850), splitter (1876), quiff-splitter,bush-beater, and bush-whacker; leather-stretcher (the 18thCentury) and leather-dresser, sky-scraper (circa 1840), button-hole worker (the 19th Century), holy iron (circa 1860; punning),gardener (the 19th Century) and garden-engine, (bald-headed)hermit (late 19th Century), bung-starter, dilator, distender,and vestryman; split-mutton (the 17th to 19th Centuries),kidney-wiper (the 20th Century; used in “The Highland Tinker”)and kidney-scraper, gut-stick, liver-turner, meat-skewer,spike-faggot, trouble-guts, and womb-brush. Others make a fairlydirect allusion to the movement of the penis in the act ofcopulation: knocker (circa 1650) and knock (the 18th Century),wriggling pole (late 17th Century or early 18th), jigger (the19th Century) and jiggling-bone (Irish), gaying instrument (the19th Century), fornicating-engine, -member, and -tool (the 19thCentury), grinding-tool (the 19th Century), pile-driver (the19th Century), tickler (the 19th Century), poker (circa 18?0)and holy poker (circa 1860), ram-rod (mid-19th Century) andrammer (mid-19th Century), gooser (circa 1871); piston(-rod)(the 20th Century), sexing-piece (circa 1925), connecting rod,coupling pin, plunger, and shove-devil. Elsewhere the allusionto copulation is metaphorical, but the reference is plain andthe effect dysphemistic: angler and fishing-rod, butcher andchopper, and floater. The penis is named as a provider of semen-cream-stick (the 18th Century), gravy-giver (the 19th Century),butter-knife, and Old Slimy-and of urine: pisser (the 19thCentury). Its temperature at certain times is alluded to: red-hot poker (the 19th Century; female), bonfire, burning rod, andfirebrand. It is seen as a source of sexual pleasure: ladies’lollipop (the 19th Century), sweetmeat (mid-19th Century),merry-maker (mid-19th Century) and merry man, joy-stick (late19th Century), joy-prong and love-prong, giggle-stick (the 20thCentury), shaft of delight, delight of women, plaything, toy,and yam-yam. And there are names that appear to reflect thepopular belief that the tumescent organ is not unduly troubledby pangs of conscience: (belly-)ruffian (? 17th to 19thCenturies), ranger (the 18th Century; from range, “to beinconstant”), girl-catcher (circa 1870), and girlometer (circa1870).The third group of synonyms, of great interest, consists ofpersonifications of the penis; almost all are euphemistic. TheBible makes a large contribution: Nimrod (the 19th Century; “amighty hunter”), the old Adam (the 19th Century), Jacob (the19th Century), Nebuchadnezzar (circa 1860-1915), Abraham (late19th Century), Father Abraham, Jezebel, and Saint Peter (who

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holds the keys of heaven). Greek myth supplies Polyphemus (the19th Century); history, Julius Caesar (circa 1840) and OldRowley (i.e., Charles II); literature, Dr. Johnson (circa 1790-1880; “perhaps”, suggests Partridge, “because there was no onethat Dr. Johnson was not prepared to stand up to”); fable,Bluebeard and Master Reynard. The personal names that have beenrecorded start with Roger (circa 1650) and Jock (before 1790;compare jock-strap) and include Jack, Jack-in-the-box (the 19thCentury; also, since circa 1870, as rhyming slang for pox,signifies syphilis) and Jack Robinson, the lately celebratedJohn Thomas (circa 1840; cf. J.T., before 1923), Thomas (the19th Century), man Thomas, John Henry, Peter (mid-19th Century),Dick (1860; military), Dick(e)y (circa 1870; schoolboys’),Little Davy (Scots), Billy-my-nag, Bob-my-nag, and two nurseryterms: Timothy(-tool) and the hypocoristic Willie, in use before1847 and before 1905 respectively. She, a twentieth-centuryLondoners’ term, is “partly euphemistic, partly proleptic.” HisMajesty in Purple Cap, a one-eyed man, an old man (the 19thCentury?, a bishop (late 19th Century), the boy (late 19thCentury), and two anonymous kinsmen, a little brother (mid-19thCentury) and an uncle, complete the roll.The fourth group is made up of literary synonyms coined or usedby English writers; a few have passed into the spoken languagefor a time. George Gascoigne gave us Robin; Shakespeare, bauble;Sir Thomas Urquhart, aspersing-tool, bracmard, coral-branch,Don Cypriano, Don Orsino, gentle-tittler, Master JohnGoodiellow, Master John Thurslay, nilnisistando, and nudinuddo;Denham, wand and ware; Dorset, tarse; Rochester, angle; Cleland,animated ivory, beloved guest, blind favourite, centre of sense,dear morsel, engine of love, (piece of) furniture, grandmovement, handle, instrument of pleasure, man machine, master-member, mutinous rogue, nipple of love, picklock, playfellow,pleasure pivot, plenipotentiary instrument, sceptre member,sensitive plant, shaft, and standard of distinction; Sterne,sausage; Burns, dearest member; Ann Radcliffe, pego (from theGreek pEgE, “spring,” “fountain”). Whitman has man-root, pond-snipe, and thumb of love. All these may be classed as euphemisms;but up to the death of Smollett, English writers were also inthe habit of coining or using names intended to draw attentionto the sexual function of the penis. Shakespeare has pike;Ebsworth, Captain Standish; Urquhart, cunny-burrow ferret,crimson chitterling, generating- (or generation-) tool,intercrural pudding, jolly-member, live sausage, nervous cane,nine-inch knocker, placket-rackel, shove-straight, Sir MartinWagstff, split-rump, touch-her-home, and trouble-giblets;Rochester, quickening-peg and whore-pipe; D’Urfey, what Harrygave Doll; Cleland, oattering-piece and -ram, conduit pipe,gristle, and sensitive truncheon; Burns, plug.Lastly, there is a group of synonyms for the penis and testiclestogether. There was a plain word, gear, first used in thesixteenth century and Standard English until the nineteenth.Euphemisms include the Netherlands (the 18th Century), place

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(the 18th Century), rule of three (the 18th Century), barber’ssign (late 18th Century-19), kit (the 19th Century) and kit oftools, bag of tricks (mid-19th Century), fancy work (the 20thCentury; a female euphemism for the male genitals, including thepubic hair), pencil and tassel (the 20th Century; nursery), twigand berries (the 20th Century; nursery) wedding kit (circa 1918;mostly army and air force), Adam’s arsenal, ladyware, luggage,other parts, parts, parts below, parts more dear, parts ofshame, and watch and seals. Dysphemisms include meat (Century16), raw meat, (mid-18th Century) and meat and two veg. (the20th Century), beef (the 19th Century), marrowbone and cleaver(the 19th Century), oil can, and tail tackle.

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Orestes Augustus Brownson ceased preaching and his Boston Quarterly Review declined in circulation. In his publication, the Reverend asserted that since his aim was to startle, he “made it a point to be as paradoxical and extravagant as he could.”

Although I confess I don’t see this suggestion, myself, as in any sense plausible or useful, Professor Walter Roy Harding has suggested this published comment by the Reverend Brownson to have been a “source” for Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN epigraph.3

1839

3. I do need to confess that regardless of how implausible such a connection seems to me, it was in fact during this same year, in July, that Thoreau copied into his Commonplace Book the portion of “The Nonnes Preestes Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer dealing with the figure of Chanticleer.

Chan’ti*cleer (?), n. [F. Chanteclair, name of the cock in the Roman duRenart (Reynard the Fox); chanter to chant + clair clear. See Chant, andClear.] A cock, so called from the clearness or loudness of his voice incrowing.

WALDEN: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to bragas lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost,if only to wake my neighbors up.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHANTICLEER

PEOPLE OFWALDEN

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WALDEN: The present was my next experiment of this kind which Ipurpose to describe more at length; for convenience, putting theexperience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not proposeto write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily aschanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wakemy neighbors up.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHANTICLEER

PEOPLE OFWALDEN

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July: Henry Thoreau copied into his Commonplace Book a portion of “The Nonnes Preestes Tale” dealing with the figure of Chanticleer, possibly from the 1830 edition by Thomas Tyrwhitt, THE CANTERBURY TALES OF CHAUCER, WITH AN ESSAY ON HIS LANGUAGE AND VERSIFICATION ETC. First, in describing the condition and substance of the “poure widewe”:

A yerd she had enclosed all aboutWith stickes, and a drie diche without,In which she had a cok highte Chaunteclere,In all the land of crowing n’as his pere.His vois was merier than the mery orgon,On masse daies that in the chirches gonWel sikerer was his crowing in his loge,Than is a clok, or any abbey orloge.By nature he knew eche ascentiounOf the equinoctial in thilke toun;For what degrees fiftene were ascended,Than crew he, that it might not ben amended.His combe was redder than the fin corall,Embattelled, as it were a castel wall.His bill was black, and as the jet it shone;Like asure were his legges and his tone;His nailes whiter than the lilie flour,And like the burned gold was his colour.This gentil cok had in his governance,Seven hennes, for to don all his plesance,Which were his susters and his paramoures,And wonder like to him, as of coloures.Of which the fairest hewed in the throte,Was cleped faire damoselle Pertelote,Curteis she was, discrete, and debonaire.And compenable, and bare hirself so faire,Sithen the day that she was sevennight old,That trewelich she hath the herte in holdOF Chaunteclere, loken in every lith:He loved hire so, that wel was him therwith.But swiche a joye it was to here hem sing,Whan that the brighte Sonne gan to spring,In swete accord: “My lefe is fare in lond.”

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Then in describing what happened after Chanticlere “flew down fro the beme”:

And finally in regard to the ruckus that then ensued:

This Chaunteclere stood high upon his toosStretching his necke, and held his eyen cloos,And gan to crowen loude for the nones;And dan Russel the fox stert up at ones,And by the garget hente Cha[u]nteclere,And on his back toward the wood him bere.

The sely widewe, and hire doughtren two,Herden thise hennes crie and maken wo,And out at the dores sterten they anon,And saw the fox toward the wode is gon,And bare upon his back the cok away:They criden, out! “Harrow and wala wa!A ha the fox!” and him they ran,And eke with staves many another man;Ran Colle our dogge, and Talbot, and Gerlond.And Malkin, with her distaf in hire hond;Ran cow and calf, and eke the very hoggesSo fered were for berking of the dogges.And shouting of the men and women eke,They ronnen so, hem thought hir hertes broke.They yellenden as fendes don in Helle:The dokes crieden as men wold him quelle;The gees for fere flewen over the trees,Out of the hive came the swarm of bees, —

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WALDEN: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to bragas lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost,if only to wake my neighbors up.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHANTICLEER

PEOPLE OFWALDEN

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PHILIP CAFARO ON DEJECTION, DESPAIR, AND WALDEN’S EPIGRAPH4

Pages 17-18: The epigraph [“I do not propose to write an ode todejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”]suggests that Thoreau has made a choice here. Like Coleridge,he could have written an ode to dejection: faced west at sunset,rather than rising to greet the sun in the east. A journal entry,written while he was composing WALDEN, confesses: “Now if thereare any who think that I am vain glorious –that I set myself upabove others –and crow over their low estate –let me tell them

WALDEN: The present was my next experiment of this kind which Ipurpose to describe more at length; for convenience, putting theexperience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not proposeto write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily aschanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wakemy neighbors up.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

CHANTICLEER

PEOPLE OFWALDEN

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

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that I could tell a pitiful story respecting myself as well asthem –if my spirits held out to do it, I could encourage themwith a sufficient list of failures –& could flow as humbly asthe very gutters themselves.” Here, in the relative privacy ofhis journal, Thoreau lets himself moon a bit. He certainly knewthese moods and the disappointments that led to them. In fact,he explored them, as essential human experiences having much toteach him.But Thoreau knows that such dejected, twilight thoughts provideno impetus and no guidance for right living. “That man who doesnot believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, andauroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life,and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.” Note the word“despair” here, from the Latin de (without) + sperare (hope). Suchhopelessness leads to lethargy and laziness. Despair is animportant term in WALDEN, often marking our “stuckness” in thequotidian and our failure to demand more from our lives andourselves. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.What is called resignation [acceptance, brute endurance] isconfirmed desperation” [the final surrender, a fatalism that istruly fatal].Rather than despair, we must build on a recognition of theessential goodness of life (esse qua esse bonum est, wrote Augustine,specifying his ethical starting point). “We should impart ourcourage, and not our despair,” Thoreau writes, “our health andease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not

4. Philip Cafaro. THOREAU’S LIVING ETHICS: WALDEN AND THE PURSUIT OF VIRTUE. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004

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spread contagion.” The epigraph’s crowing cock puts a simple“yes” to life at the center of ethics. We can get from thissimple “yes” to more complex affirmations, but never from a “no”to a “yes.” And this first premise, or necessary practicalpostulate, cannot be proven. Affirmation or negation alwaysremains the main choice facing each of us.Consider a second key passage, one of the most often-cited inWALDEN:

I went to the woods because I wished to livedeliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, andnot, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.I did not wish to live what was not life, living is sodear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless itwas quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck outall the marrow of life ... to know it by experience, andbe able to give a true account of it in my nextexcursion.

The passage develops into a stirring peroration to life andlife’s grand possibilities (experiencing deeply, knowing truth,sharing this knowledge with others). But Thoreau makes it clearthat these possibilities can be explored only by those who livedeliberately. The term encompasses both the ability to consideralternatives and the ability to act — to instantiate onealternative rather than another. The presence of liber and liberatesuggests an essential connection between such deliberation andhuman freedom.If choosing to speak a basic “yes” to life is one key antidoteto despair, another is deliberation: thinking through particularoptions and actively choosing the best ones, rather than fallinginto the easiest ones. Deliberation is an act of optimism,signaling the belief that we can have choices; that we candistinguish better from worse choices; that we can act on thatknowledge and improve our lives. “I know of no more encouragingfact,” Thoreau writes, “than the unquestionable ability of manto elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” Throughout WALDEN,he renews his call for “deliberate” action in constructing ahouse, choosing a career, reading a book, building a fireplace.Deliberation is the key to living well, affirming human freedom,and meeting life’s challenges. Life is glorious, Thoreauinsists, and so the stakes are high. For we may come to the endof our lives and find that we have not lived. We may waste ourlives on inessential trivialities. We may fail to learn whatlife has to teach. Like the penitential brahmins described inWalden’s third paragraph, we may lead lives that deny or deformour human nature. In all these ways we may, and often do, denylife.

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April 20, Thursday: A review, by Jonathan S. Byrne, of Robert Weisbuch’s “Thoreau’s Dawn and the Lake School Night,” that had appeared in 1987 in Harold Bloom’s MODERN CRITICAL VIEWS (NY: Chelsea House).

The theme of this essay is earliness (“Thoreau’s dawn”).“Earliness” is a literary term I’m not familiar with; Weisbuchsays: “A perfect earliness would be free of influence, and itsliterary statement would eschew allusion and all debate withother texts. The earliest author would be in immediate relationto Nature, in which, as Bergson tells us, no negative exists.One foot planted on the first grounds, the other on the ephemeralGround of Spirit from which Nature spontaneously arises, thecolossus of dawn would acknowledge nothing alien with which tobicker.” Weisbuch says such an uninfluenced earliness is HenryThoreau’s goal in WALDEN, and he tries to show why this isimpossible.Weisbuch shows how Thoreau tried to distance himself from anddisavow the influence of English Romanticism (Coleridge andWordsworth — the Lake School). The title page of the firstedition of WALDEN has the now famous sentence, “I do not proposeto write an ode to dejection, but brag as lustily as Chanticleerin the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake myneighbors up.” Weisbuch says Samuel Taylor Coleridge is“Thoreau’s chosen opposite, specifically the night waking poetof “Dejection: An Ode.” After giving examples of Coleridge’s influence on Thoreau,Weisbuch says, “Coleridge is not the leading figure for Englandin WALDEN, but only the most overt. Coleridge stands in for themore powerful influence of William Wordsworth.” Wordsworth’s“Intimations of Immortality” seems to have affected Thoreau moststrongly, but Weisbuch believes, “It is the figure of Wordsworth... beyond any single poem, that engages Thoreau, for Americanstend to think in terms of human representatives rather thantexts, in confronting what is English.”

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality”from RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

by William WordsworthOur birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:The Soul that rises with us, our life’s StarHath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar:Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we comeFrom God, who is our home:Heaven lies about us in our infancy!Shades of the prison-house begin to closeUpon the growing Boy,

1989

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But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,He sees it in his Joy;The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s priest, And by the vision splendidIs on his way attended;At length the Man perceives it die away,And fade into the light of common day.

Weisbuch argues convincingly that Thoreau wants to distancehimself from the cultivation of England and Englishman. In orderfor his experiment to succeed (WALDEN), Thoreau has to be anoriginal — early. Weisbuch says, “Thoreau strikes at Coleridgenot because Coleridge is a good man down but because Coleridgeis a giant keeping him under, an influential poet and thinkerwhom Thoreau so resembles in many points that differences needto be dramatized for Thoreau to make his own home in an Americanwoods.”

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2011. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>.

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

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Prepared: May 14, 2014

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a

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request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.