Reflection: Walden

Sadie Ries
Period 6
10-8-07
Walden
When reading “Walden”, I was extremely fascinated by Henry David Thoreau’s use of different types imagery throughout the story. From the beginning to the end of the story Thoreau uses metaphors, similes, and personification to describe life, events and places.
Imagery is first revealed in the beginning of the story, when Thoreau describes how most farmers give up on the land, thinking that they have already got the best of it. Through the use of a metaphor Thoreau states that the owners, who sell there land thinking they have gotten the best of it, often do not know “It for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most remarkable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded on it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk” (375). This is a metaphor for the idea that the farmer only takes what he sees first, but not what was invisible now, but might soon be revealed. Again, imagery is revealed by the use of a simile to show how we [humans and Thoreau himself] live “meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes” (376). This simile stands for the fact that we are like animals because we work hard and fight, for a reason we do not always know. Finally, in the end of the story, personification is used when Thoreau states, “Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree…”(379). In this quote life is being personified as having buried an egg, but in fact life cannot have an egg, let alone bury one.
These three quotes are examples of imagery being used in the forms of a metaphor, simile, and personification, to show how farmers thought, the way people lived, and life in generally.