Conceived initially as a travel book, A Week was immeasurably deepened into an elegiac account of experience by a tragic event that occurred in Thoreau’s life in the period following the 1839 voyage. In 1842, Thoreau’s companion on that voyage, his brother John, died suddenly, and in agonizing pain, from lockjaw.

Without question, this was the greatest loss that Thoreau ever was to suffer. (He seems to have undergone, in the aftermath of his brother’s death, a sympathetic case of the illness that caused John’s death, and the few entries that appear in his journal in this period are desperately mournful.) Interestingly, though the pronoun “we” characterizes the narrator often in the book, the brother’s name is never mentioned—an indication perhaps of Thoreau’s enduring need to distance himself from this loss. The first epigraph of A Week is a poem by Thoreau himself:

 

Where‘er thou sail’st who sailed with me,
Though now thou climbest loftier mounts,
And fairer rivers dost ascend,
Be thou my Muse, my Brother—.

 

Aside from this poem, however, there is nothing in A Week that directly refers to the death of John Thoreau. Instead, his memory is evoked through various symbolic strategies. For example, the long digression on friendship in the chapter “Wednesday” surely is intended to reflect the intimacy Thoreau shared with his brother. Even the ubiquitous “we” of the narrator’s voice speaks to this intimacy. So intertwined are the two brothers’ identities in this pronoun that it is often difficult to tell whether a given action has been taken by Henry or John, or both at once. And, as we have seen, A Week is filled with images of people and places that have been lost; in part, they stand as surrogates for the dead brother. Great elegies, such as Lycidas, characteristically displace and generalize grief in this way.

It would be a mistake, however, to understand the many historical losses recounted by Thoreau in A Week as mere substitutions for John’s death. From the earliest stages of his literary career, Thoreau had been fascinated by the past. His earliest journal entries, written in the 1830s immediately following his graduation from Harvard, are filled with ruminations on earlier eras and their possible meanings for his own life. It would be more accurate to say, therefore, that the death of John in 1842 intensified and focused Thoreau’s lifelong preoccupation with the past, and refigured that preoccupation in specifically elegiac terms.

To emphasize the elegiac aspects of A Week is to remind ourselves that throughout Western history rivers, and voyages upon them, have served as metaphors of transience and mortality. (The American artist Thomas Cole’s series of paintings “The Voyage of Life” [1839-40] is a good example from Thoreau’s own time.) Yet, as I indicated earlier, A Week is not solely a mournful book. Its rivers also support a spiritual buoyancy, and provide the setting for exploration and adventure. Most important, however, the book’s larger structure enables it to transcend and redeem the individual losses that it recounts.

From one point of view, the images of the shore—such as the ruined village of Billerica and the flooded fields of Sudbury—suggest loss and discontinuity. But over the course of the voyage as a whole, such images are absorbed in, and redeemed by, the writer’s historical imagination—providing a sense of continuity from past to present. What the twentieth-century writer Charles Olson said of his own historical imaginings in the Maximus Poems can also be said of Thoreau’s in A Week: “my memory is / the history of time.” That is to say, mere historical time—discreet moments experienced in a “progressive” or linear development—is ultimately transfigured by the author’s imagination into myth, a myth of continuity and redemption. For this is a voyage both out and back, a voyage of both observation and reflection, a voyage that carries us into the past but also ultimately returns us to the present, and points our way to the future.

Thoreau shaped his narrative with this larger movement in mind, chronologically restructuring the actual voyage of 1839, which had taken two full weeks. When Thoreau and his brother concluded the first half of their voyage, setting their boat ashore near Concord, New Hampshire, on Wednesday night, September 4, they then embarked the following morning upon a week-long hiking expedition that led them into the White Mountains. They returned to the Merrimack River, and their boat, the following Thursday morning, September 12, and, aided by the rapid downstream current of the Merrimack, arrived home in Concord, Massachusetts, the following evening.

Thoreau does not elide from his narrative the week-long journey over land, but he radically foreshortens the sense of its duration by briefly describing rather than dramatizing it. (His account of the brothers’ ascension of Mount Agiocochook, in the White Mountains, is particularly brief and perfunctory.) Most important, he folds the entire period of the land journey into one “day”—the chapter “Thursday”—thereby gathering both of the journey’s Thursdays into that single chapter. “Thursday” thus becomes a purely literary rather than a chronological space. This strategy of temporal condensation may remind us of Walden, where Thoreau presents his two years at the Pond as one annual cycle of the seasons.

But such condensation has a somewhat different effect in A Week than it does in Walden. In Walden, it allows the author to unify his experience by encompassing it within a single timeless “year.” In A Week, however, timelessness is never a possibility. Indeed, the whole point of the journey is to enter the stream of time and attempt to understand its meanings. What temporal condensation achieves in A Week is a different kind of unity; by abbreviating the brothers’ excursion into the White Mountains, Thoreau emphasizes their voyage—and thereby exploits the classical structure of the departure and the return.

In general, the outward-bound voyage of A Week dramatizes the writer’s encounter with time and its losses; on that voyage, he pays close attention to the shore—which, in its discreet scenes of spoliation and historical change, symbolizes the passage of time. The homeward voyage, on the other hand, suggests assimilation, resolution, and renewal. If the primary mode of perception on the outward voyage had been observation (of the shore), then the primary mode of the return voyage is contemplation. Now we are involved in an inward exploration, and, symbolically, our vision leaves the shore and returns to the river and the flow of consciousness that it represents. “[W]e observed less what was passing on the shore,” Thoreau notes, “than the dateless associations and impressions which the season awakened, anticipating in some measure the progress of the year.”

As this phrase suggests, A Week’s shift in modes of perception corresponds to a shift of the seasons, which, in turn, confirms the book’s movement from historical time to natural or cyclical time.