Analysis of Conclusion of Thoreau’s Walden

Analysis of “Conclusion” of Thoreau’s Walden

The chapter entitled “Conclusion” is a fitting and compelling final chapter to Thoreau’s Walden. Throughout Walden, Thoreau delves into his surroundings, the very specifics of nature, and what he was thinking about, without employing any metaphors and including none of his poignant aphorisms. However, placed among these at-times tedious sections, come spectacular and wholly enjoyable interludes of great and profound thought from a writer that has become extremely popular in modern America. His growth of popularity over such contemporary favorites as Emerson in our modern era stems from the fact that Thoreau calls for an “ideological revolution to simplification” in our lives. This concept and sentiment is in extreme opposition to how we actually live our lives today. More and more people have been cut off from spiritual development and the cultivation of the mind and body. Often times the only time people think about their own spirituality and soul is in church or in reference to thinking about their god or religion. The truth is that there is much more to stare at, wonder at, and worship than just an image and idea of God in the mind. Thoreau, a man who believed in God himself and alludes to that being many times throughout Walden, lets us know and see that much more in the world is worthy of deep thought and reverence: all that earthly nature has to offer. Thoreau’s “Conclusion” is an excellent and fitting ending to this great work that teaches us so many things.

Deviating from the structure of the rest of the journal, the final chapter doesn’t go through intermittent periods of dry description and then bursts of savory philosophical insights--the final chapter is one lo...

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...ning star.” The first sentence in this statement presents a paradox that at least makes us see things from a different light (no pun intended), and in the second sentence Thoreau is saying that a new day comes only to those who are alive and cognizant enough to receive it. Perhaps there is not so much deep meaning as we can be tempted to fathom in Thoreau’s last four lines. It seems to me, though, a very fitting conclusion to a book that has nature and its ongoing processes at root, while using this base to build an abstract, philosophical castle in the sky. He rooted the castle’s base in the world directly around him, which he immersed himself in daily, and his concept of a supernatural force in that same world, his God.

Work Cited

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Joseph Wood Krutch. New York: Bantam, 2001.