SOURCE: “An Unpublished Thoreau Poem,” in American Literature, Vol. 34, No. 1, March 1962, pp. 119-21.

In the following essay, White offers a previously unpublished text of an early Thoreau poem and discusses its similarities to works by Thomas Gray and John Milton.

In Appendix B of the Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau (Chicago, 1943) Carl Bode refers to poems he could not find, among them “Life is a Summer's Day,” an “original autograph manuscript poem, probably unpublished, of eleven stanzas of triplets, written in ink on both sides of [a] quarto sheet, with alterations and emendations in the hand of the author; unsigned. Dated July 2, 1837.” And he quotes from the sale catalogue of the Stephen H. Wakeman Collection (New York, 1924, item number 978) the three opening lines:

Life is a summer's day, When as it were for ay, We sport and play. 

Three stanzas and the second page of the manuscript of...