Stafford/American Literature/Transcendentalists Your Name:______

A non-traditional appreciation of nature


Directions: As you walk through Nature (or the MIHS courtyard), consider the transcendental notion of viewing Nature as a way to commune with God, or a higher being. Let your observations teach you, remind you, or challenge you, and record these insights below.

OBSERVATIONS OF NATURE

What you see/hear/touch/smell in Nature: / What lesson/memory/insight this provides
EXAMPLE: I see birds flying in a perfect V / EXAMPLE: There is order and beauty in things that I do not understand
1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 

When you return to your desk, pick one thing you saw today and write about your observation. Push your observation to transcend a mere description – apply it to the transcendental idea of Nature and the Divine, and see if you can apply it to your world.

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Stafford/American Literature/Transcendentalists Your Name:______

From"Walking" By Henry David Thoreau

  …of taking walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages…They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean…Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.

Questions:

1.  Describe the analogy Thoreau makes with man and the meandering river?

2.  What do you think Thoreau means by “he who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all”?

  “Rhodora” ByRalph Waldo Emerson

On being asked, whence is the flower.

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

Question:

3.  In this poem, what is an observation Emerson makes about man and nature?