chapter 4

A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove

Obscurity in Walden

The experience of reading Thoreau’s Walden is often a disconcerting one.

The very discrepancy between the laconic, concrete chapter titles and the
long, convoluted sentences of the text alerts the reader to a process of level-
shifting that delights and baffles—indeed, that delights because it baffles.
Consider, for example, the following passage:

I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done

in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through
a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that
they would not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be
some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an
egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these
things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not
forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy.1

It is difficult to read this passage without doing a double take. The logical
seriousness of the style of “Nevertheless, we will not forget . . .” in no way
prepares the reader for the sudden appearance of wheat in a mummy. The
passage shifts with unruffled rapidity from abstract generalization to dead
figure (“squeeze their old notions out of them”) to a soon-to-reawaken fig-
ure hidden in a cliché (“maggot in the head”) to mini-narrative (“deposited
there nobody knows when”) to folk wisdom (“Not even fire kills these

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 things”) to counterclaim (“Nevertheless, we will not forget . . .”). By the time
one reaches the mummy, one no longer knows what the figure stands for,
whether it, like the mummy, is dead or alive, or even where the boundaries
of the analogy (if it is an analogy) lie.
It is paradoxical that a writer who constantly exhorts us to “Simplify,
simplify” should also be the author of some of the most complex and diffi-
cult paragraphs in the English language. What is it about this seemingly
simple account of life in the woods that so often bewilders the reader, mak-
ing him, in Emerson’s words, “nervous and wretched to read it”?
In an article entitled “Walden’s False Bottoms,” Walter Benn Michaels
amply demonstrates the book’s capacity to engender nervousness as he de-
tails the long history of readers’ attempts to cope with Walden’s obscurity,
first by attributing it to Thoreau’s alleged “want of continuity of mind” (James
Russell Lowell), then by subsuming it under the larger patterns of Walden’s
literary unity (Matthiessen, Anderson), then by considering it as a challenge
to the reader’s ability to read figuratively (Cavell, Buell). Michaels ends his
own account of the undecidability of Walden’s contradictions by saying, “It’s
heads I win, tails you lose. No wonder the game makes us nervous.”2
The passage through which I would like to gain access to one of the prin-
cipal difficulties of Walden’s game is precisely a passage about losing. It is
one of the most often-discussed passages in the book, a fact that is in itself
interesting and instructive. The passage stands as an isolated paragraph,
seemingly unrelated to what precedes or follows:

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on
their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, de-
scribing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or
two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even
seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to
recover them as if they had lost them themselves. (16)

It should come as no surprise that the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle
dove are almost universally seen as symbols by Thoreau’s readers. The ques-
tions asked of this passage are generally, What do the three animals symbol-
ize? and Where did the symbols come from? The answers to these questions
are many and varied: for T. M. Raysor, the animals represent the “gentle
boy” Edmund Sewall, Thoreau’s dead brother John, and the woman to whom
he unsuccessfully proposed marriage, Ellen Sewall; for Francis H. Allen, the
symbols represent “the vague desires and aspirations of man’s spiritual nature”;
for John Burroughs, they stand for the “fine effluence” that for Thoreau
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 constitutes “the ultimate expression of fruit of any created thing.” Others
have seen in the symbols “a mythical record of [Thoreau’s] disappointments”
(Emerson), a “quest . . . for an absolutely satisfactory condition of friend-
ship” (Mark Van Doren), the “wildness that keeps man in touch with nature,
intellectual stimulus, and purification of spirit” (Frank Davidson), and a “lost
Eden” (Alfred Kazin). Sources for Thoreau’s symbols are said to be found in
such diverse texts as Voltaire’s Zadig (Edith Peairs), the “Chinese Four Books”
that Thoreau edited for The Dial, an old English ballad, an Irish folk tale,
and a poem by Emerson.3
The sense shared by all readers that the hound, the bay horse, and the
turtle dove are symbols, but that what they symbolize is unclear, is made
explicit in the following remarks by Stanley Cavell:

I have no new proposal to offer about the literary or biographical sources

of those symbols. But the very obviousness of the fact that they are sym-
bols, and function within a little myth, seems to me to tell us what we
need to know. The writer comes to us from a sense of loss; the myth does
not contain more than symbols because it is no set of desired things he
has lost, but a connection with things, the track of desire itself.4

The notion that what is at stake here is not any set of lost things but rather
the very fact of loss seems to find confirmation in the replies that Thoreau
himself gave on two different occasions to the question of the passage’s
meaning. In a letter to B. B. Wiley, dated April 26, 1857, he writes:

How shall we account for our pursuits if they are original? We get the
language with which to describe our various lives out of a common
mint. If others have their losses, which they are busy repairing, so
have I mine, & their hound & horse may perhaps be the symbols of
some of them. But also I have lost, or am in danger of losing, a far finer
& more etherial treasure, which commonly no loss of which they are
conscious will symbolize—this I answer hastily & with some hesita-
tion, according as I now understand my own words. (Annotated Walden,
157–58)
And on another occasion, as the Variorum tells it:

Miss Ellen Watson, in “Thoreau Visits Plymouth” . . . , reports that when

Thoreau visited Plymouth, Mass., a year or two after the publication of
Walden, he met there “Uncle Ed” Watson who asked him what he meant
when he said he lost “a hound, a horse, and a dove.” Thoreau replied,

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 “Well, Sir, I suppose we have all our losses.” “That’s a pretty way to
answer a fellow,” replied Uncle Ed. (270)

Most readers have shared Uncle Ed’s disappointment at this answer that
seems no answer at all. The editors of the Annotated and Variorum Waldens
both conclude their surveys of the literature on the subject in a similar way:

In conclusion, however, it should be pointed out that there is no una-

nimity on interpretation of these symbols and the individual critic is
left free to interpret as he wishes. (Variorum, 272)

Since there is no clear explanation, each reader will have to supply his
own. (Annotated Walden, 158)

In attempting to fill these enigmatic symbols with interpretive content, most

readers have assumed that the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle dove were
figurative containers or concrete vehicles into which some deeper, higher, or
more abstract meanings could be made to fit. This is what the business of in-
terpreting symbols is all about. In cases like the present, where there exists no
unanimity or clarity about the symbols’ meanings, readers tend to believe not
that there is something inadequate about the way they are asking the question,
but that each individual becomes “free” to settle on an answer for himself.
Before going back to attempt a different type of analysis of this passage, I
would like first to quote in its entirety the paragraph that immediately pre-
cedes the hound-horse-dove passage in the text:

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to
improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the
meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the
present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for
there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not vol-
untarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell
all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still
on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,
describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one
or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even
seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to
recover them as if they had lost them themselves. (16)

There appears at first sight to be no relation between these two paragraphs.

Yet the very abruptness of the transition, the very discrepancy of rhetorical
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 modes, may perhaps indicate that the first paragraph consists of a set of
instructions about how to read the second. It is surely no accident that one
of the most enigmatic passages in Walden should be placed immediately
after the sentence “You will pardon some obscurities.” If the secret identities
of the hound, the horse, and the dove are never to be revealed, it is not, says
Thoreau, that they are being voluntarily withheld. Such secrets are simply
inseparable from the nature of my trade—that is, writing. “I would gladly
tell all that I know about it, and never paint ‘No Admittance’ on my gate.” But
all I know about it is not all there is about it. You are not being forcibly or
gently kept away from a knowledge I possess. The gate is wide open, and that
is why the path is so obscure. The sign “obscurity” is pointing directly at the
symbols, making the sentence read, “I long ago lost an X, a Y, and a Z,” and
you are supposed to recognize them not as obscure symbols but as symbols
standing for the obscure, the lost, the irretrievable.
But yet, we insist, your x, y, and z are so particular—so hound-like, so
horselike, so birdlike. If they merely symbolize the lost object as such, why
do we hear the baying of the hound and the tramp of the horse? Why do
those fellow travellers give us such precise reports?
Ah, but you see, Thoreau might answer, the symbols are symbols, after
all. What is lost is always intensely particular. Yet it is known only in that it
is lost—lost in one of the two eternities between which we clumsily try to
toe the line.
To follow the trail of what is lost is possible only, it seems, if the loss is
maintained in a state of transference from traveler to traveler, so that each
takes up the pursuit as if the loss were his own. Loss, then, ultimately belongs
to an other; the losses we treat as our own are perhaps losses of which we
never had conscious knowledge ourselves. “If others have their losses, which
they are busy repairing, so have I mine, & their hound & horse may perhaps
be the symbols of some of them. But also I have lost, or am in danger of los-
ing, a far finer & more etherial treasure, which commonly no loss of which
they are conscious will symbolize.”
Walden’s great achievement is to wake us up to our own lost losses, to make
us participate in the transindividual movement of loss in its infinite particu-
larity, urging us passionately to follow the tracks of we know not quite what,
as if we had lost it, or were in danger of losing it, ourselves.
In order to communicate the irreducibly particular yet ultimately unreadable
nature of loss, Thoreau has chosen to use three symbols that clearly are
symbols but that do not really symbolize anything outside themselves. They
are figures for which no literal, proper term can be substituted. They are, in
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 other words, catachreses—“figures of abuse,” figurative substitutes for a lit-
eral term that does not exist. Like the “legs” and “arms” of our favorite re-
cliner, Thoreau’s hound, horse, and dove belong to a world of homely figura-
tive richness, yet the impersonal literality they seem to presuppose is
nowhere to be found. The structure of catachretic symbolism is thus the
very structure of transference and loss. Through it Thoreau makes us see
that every lost object is always, in a sense, a catachresis, a figurative substitute
for nothing that ever could be literal.
It could be said that Nature itself is for Thoreau a catachretic symbol that
enables him to displace his discourse without filling in its symbolic tenor.
But in order to analyze a more particular aspect of the way in which Tho-
reau’s catachretic rhetoric creates obscurity in Walden, let us first look at a
more traditional and semantically “full” use of nature imagery: the analogies
drawn between natural objects and human predicaments.
I begin with a somewhat atypically explicit analogy:

One day . . . I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the
bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I staid there, or
more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly
come out of the torpid state. It appears to me that for a like reason men
remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should
feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of
necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. (33)

No rhetorical strategy could be more classical than this weaving of analogy

between the natural and the human worlds. It is the mark of the moralist,
the evangelist, the satirist, and the lyric poet, all of which Thoreau indeed
is. From the New Testament to Aesop and Swedenborg, the natural world
has been a source of figures of the preoccupations and foibles of man. As
Emerson puts it in his own essay on Nature:

The memorable words of history and the proverbs of nations consist

usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth.
Thus; A rolling stone gathers no moss; A bird in hand is worth two in
the bush; A cripple in the right way will beat a racer in the wrong; Make
hay while the sun shines; ’Tis hard to carry a full cup even; Vinegar is
the son of wine; The last ounce broke the camel’s back; Long-lived trees
make roots first;—and the like. In their primary sense these are trivial
facts, but we repeat them for the value of their analogical import. What
is true of proverbs, is true of all fables, parables, and allegories.5

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 Yet although Thoreau draws on many centuries of analogical writing,
there is a subtle difference in his rhetorical use of nature, and it is the speci-
ficity of that difference that I would like to attempt to identify in conclusion.
The difference begins to become perceptible in the following examples:

Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may
rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?—for the nobler
plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far
from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which,
though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have per-
fected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that
most would not know them in their flowering season. (5)

We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by

addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are
our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be
stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments,
constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts
are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling
and so destroying the man. (21)

In both these examples, what begins as a fairly routine analogy tends, in

the course of its elaboration, to get wildly out of hand. The fascination with
the vehicle as an object of attention in its own right totally eclipses the orig-
inal anthropomorphic tenor. Words like esculents, biennials, cortex, and liber
pull away from their subordinate, figurative status and begin giving infor-
mation about themselves, sidetracking the reader away from the original
thrust of the analogy. In the first example, what begins as an opposition
between nobler and humbler men and plants collapses as it is revealed that
the humbler plants are humble only because they are never allowed to flower.
In the second example, the hierarchy of integuments ends by privileging not
the skin but the shirt as that part of a man that cannot be removed without
destroying him. In an effort to show that man is confused about where his
inside ends and his outside begins, Thoreau resorts to a logic of tree growth
which entirely takes over as the exogenous striptease procedes.
It is perhaps in the “Bean-field” chapter that the rhetorical rivalries be-
tween the literal and the figurative, the tenor and the vehicle, become most
explicit. On the one hand, Thoreau writes, “I was determined to know beans,”
and goes on to detail the hours of hoeing and harvesting, listing the names
of weeds and predators, and accounting for outgo and income down to the

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 last half penny. And on the other, he admits that “some must work in fields
if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one
day.” He speaks of sowing the seeds of sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, and
innocence, asking, “Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for
seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men?”
The perverse complexity of Walden’s rhetoric is intimately related to the
fact that it is never possible to be sure what the rhetorical status of any given
image is. And this is because what Thoreau has done in moving to Walden
Pond is to move himself, literally, into the world of his own figurative lan-
guage. The literal woods, pond, and bean field still assume the same classical
rhetorical guises in which they have always appeared, but they are suddenly
readable in addition as the nonfigurative ground of a naturalist’s account of
life in the woods. The ground has shifted, but the figures are still figures.
When is it that we decide that Thoreau never lost that hound, that horse, and
that dove? It is because we can never be absolutely sure that we find our-
selves forever on their trail.
Walden is obscure, therefore, to the extent that Thoreau has literally crossed
over into the very parable he is writing, where reality itself has become a
catachresis, both ground and figure at once, and where, he tells us, “if you stand
right fronting and face to face with a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on
both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you
through the heart and marrow.”

notes
“A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove: Obscurity in Walden.” From A World
of Difference, 49–56. © 1987 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with
permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (New York: Signet, 1960),
22. All page references to Walden are to this edition.
2. Walter Benn Michaels, “Walden’s False Bottoms,” Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual
Studies 1 (1977): 132–49.
3. For detailed bibliographical information on these and other readings of the
passage, see The Annotated Walden, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (New York:
Clarkson N. Potter, 1970), 157–58, and The Variorum Walden, ed. Walter
Harding (New York: Twayne, 1962), 270–72.
4. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (San Francisco: North Point, 1981), 51.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Prose and Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, 1964), 20.

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