Poem of the Day: ‘I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied’

Like being a Marxist, being a committed Transcendentalist always seems like not that much fun. Forced to go around asserting that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Believing that only in fleeing to the woods can you live deliberately. Torn, as E.B. White once remarked, “by two powerful and opposing drives — the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the world straight.” Given all this, it’s not hard to believe that Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) felt like “a parcel of vain strivings tied / By a chance bond together.” It’s easy to make fun of Thoreau for all his earnest setting-the-world-straight business — but it’s also easy to forget his capacity for enjoying that world. For anyone who teaches the Transcendentalists, year after year, to high-school or college students, once you’ve dealt with Emerson, Thoreau’s “Walden” comes as a breath of actual air. For all Thoreau’s talk about “my days,” as if the world and time in their heightened authenticity were his own conceptual constructs, there are those moments when “a fishhawk dimples the surface of the pond and brings up a fish,” and “the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither.” In those moments the impulse to set the world straight holds its peace. The world simply is, and it is enjoyed. Today’s Poem of the Day reads like the internal tug-of-war it describes: the setting-things-straight impulse, which wants to impose Meaning on things, at odds with the impulse simply to see and name and apprehend beauty. Witness, simply, the shift from the abstraction of the opening stanza to the particulars in the second. From “strivings” and “links” and unreal metaphorical “weather” we move to “violets without their roots, / And sorrel intermixed,” all tied together with “a wisp of straw.” With reluctance we yank ourselves back to the level of capital-M Meaning and “the law / By which I’m fixed.” Despite the pleasant structure of these sestets, with their varying meters and their abcacb rhyme scheme, nothing is quite so compelling as those broken-stemmed violets mixed with sorrel, damp from the woods and tied up with straw, doomed to fade, but vivid in the moment when they’re all still almost alive. We might consider this poem to be yet another non-exception that proves the rule: Transcendentalists made not bad poets, maybe, but minor ones at best. It’s perhaps not strictly true that you can have a philosophy or you can write poetry, but not both. Still, the desire to enjoy the world seems more the province of poetry than the urge to set the world straight. And as this poem suggests, even its author — bent on setting the world straight — wasn’t having as much fun as he had hoped. I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tiedby Henry David ThoreauI am a parcel of vain strivings tiedBy a chance bond together,Dangling this way and that, their linksWere made so loose and wide,Methinks,For milder weather.A bunch of violets without their roots,And sorrel intermixed,Encircled by a wisp of strawOnce coiled about their shoots,The lawBy which I’m fixed.A nosegay which Time clutched from outThose fair Elysian fields,With weeds and broken stems, in haste,Doth make the rabble routThat wasteThe day he yields.And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,Drinking my juices up,With no root in the landTo keep my branches green,But standIn a bare cup.Some tender buds were left upon my stemIn mimicry of life,But ah! the children will not know,Till time has withered them,The woeWith which they’re rife.But now I see I was not plucked for naught,And after in life’s vaseOf glass set while I might survive,But by a kind hand broughtAliveTo a strange place.That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,And by another year,Such as God knows, with freer air,More fruits and fairer flowersWill bear,While I droop here.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied’

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