SOURCE: “The Sluggard Knight in Thoreau's Poetry,” in Thoreau Journal Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 2, April 1973, pp. 6-9.

In the following essay, Silverman maintains that Thoreau's “sluggard knights” in his poems suffer conflicts between their desire for heroic self-assertion and their lazy natures.

Many of Thoreau's poems record his effort to unite thought and action or, as he put it, to live deliberately. Surprisingly often, the effort seems to leave Thoreau depressed not elated, stirred less by morning courage than by midnight Angst. Several poems start with declarations of impotence: “In vain I see the morning rise”; “I am the autumnal sun”; “I am a parcel of vain strivings. …” Often the voice in the poems is not Pan's but Prufrock's.

Not only the deflated tone calls attention to these poems. They also present a special organization. To dramatize the transcendental problem of thought and action, Thoreau drew with a sort...