SOURCE: "Walden: Or, the Metamorphoses," in The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration, University of Illinois Press, 1958, pp. 293-353.

In this excerpt, Paul examines Walden's numerous images of renewal and transformation.

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms. Ye gods, for you yourselves have wrought the changes, breathe on these my undertakings, and bring down my song in unbroken strains from the world's very beginning even unto the present time.

—Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 1-4

. . . there is but one great poetic idea possible to man—the progress of a soul through the various forms of existence.

—Margaret Fuller, "Goethe," The Dial, 1841

Some men's lives are but an aspiration, a yearning toward a higher state, and they are wholly misapprehended, until they are referred to, or traced through, all their metamorphoses.

—Thoreau, Journal, 1851

I

What Thoreau finally published on August 9, 1854, some seven years after...