{"id":108644,"date":"2017-07-10T12:13:34","date_gmt":"2017-07-10T16:13:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=108644"},"modified":"2017-07-11T14:06:18","modified_gmt":"2017-07-11T18:06:18","slug":"chute-thoreau-heat-wave-in-concord","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2017\/07\/10\/chute-thoreau-heat-wave-in-concord\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrate Thoreau’s 200th birthday with a summer poem from a Bates author"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Henry<\/a>

Henry David Thoreau, photographed in 1856 by Benjamin D. Maxham (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

To celebrate the 200th birthday of Henry David Thoreau on July 12, here’s a summertime poem by Professor Emeritus of Biology Robert Chute, a noted Maine poet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Chute’s “Heat Wave in Concord” reimagines a sizzling summer day in 1852 when Thoreau and a friend, William Ellery Channing, waded into the river and walked up and down its shoreline.<\/p>\n

Thoreau called such jaunts “fluvial walks.” In his journal on July 10, 1852, he noted that the Assabet River (which joins the Sudbury River to form the Concord River) was the “properest highway for this weather.”<\/p>\n

The poem’s opening epigraph is from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” in which a young woman watches 28 naked men bathing in a river and imagines joining them.<\/p>\n

Published in 1996, the poem won the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Heat Wave in Concord<\/h3>\n

By Robert Chute<\/h5>\n
<\/h5>\n

\u201cDancing and laughing along the beach
\n    came the twenty-ninth bather…\u201d1<\/a><\/sup><\/em><\/p>\n

I<\/h5>\n

Farmers working the fields quit early,
\n  as much for ox or horse as for men \u2013
\n    one old man had already died; exhausted
\n      by heat, wrung out, wrinkled
\n        like dried fruit.<\/p>\n

Their women, buttoned, laced, strapped
\n  under petticoats, skirts, sleeves,
\n    sit and work, work and sit
\n      in the dim, dead heat
\n        of parlor, kitchen, and shed.<\/p>\n

But one, an exceptional one, in
\n  a windowless storage room, stands,
\n    naked and white in a wash tub\u2019s cold ring.
\n      Her cast off clothes spilled
\n        like dried discarded flowers.<\/p>\n

The tinned dipper lifts water, still cool
\n  from the well, again and again. The water
\n    passing over her body like
\n      unseen fingers and back
\n        to the tub again.<\/p>\n

Perhaps one of them also dreams of the river,
\n  of young men who float there,
\n    pale bellies tempting the sun.<\/p>\n

II<\/h5>\n

From houses on opposite sides
\n  of the elm-roofed main street Henry
\n    and Ellery, leaving dishes and scraps
\n      of cold dinner behind,
\n        meet, retreat to the river.<\/p>\n

A man stands in a barn door, his shirt
\n  stained with sweat, hat hanging slack
\n    in his hand. A woman in the shed\u2019s
\n      dark cave churns the morning\u2019s milk 
\n        the heat would soon sour.<\/p>\n

They shake their heads. What beside envy
\n  do they feel as these renegades slip away?
\n    Do they imagine how it feels to peel
\n      close, sweaty clothes away,
\n        let the waters have their play?<\/p>\n

At the river Henry explains that banks have
\n  a gender, this one, for example, being
\n    convex, alluvial, gradual, and
\n      feminine; the opposite, concave,
\n        undercut, and masculine.<\/p>\n

Ellery makes some comments that
\n  Henry\u2019s Journal will never repeat.
\n    They strip and wade in.<\/p>\n

III<\/h5>\n

Soon, by the opposite, masculine, shore, up
\n  to their chins, they face the current.
\n    The heat of the day is carried
\n      down, away. They wade upstream,
\n        wearing their hats against the sun.<\/p>\n

They hold their bundled clothing high.
\n  From deep holes to shallows
\n    the water falls, rises again.
\n      Chest, ankle, knee, belly,
\n        chest, and down again.<\/p>\n

Rounding a bend they see the plank bridge.
\n  Boys, their work done, race and strip
\n    and plunge. Boys breaching
\n      and splashing; marble boys riding
\n        imaginary dolphins.<\/p>\n

On the bank one boy sits, lifting a foot
\n  to examine some bruise, fixed
\n    in an instant as an engraving in
\n      an antiquities book; but subtly
\n        colored, sunburned, bare.<\/p>\n

The two men put on shirts now, feeling the sting
\n  of the sun. Bridge rails bleed pitch,
\n    the planks shrink.<\/p>\n

IV<\/h5>\n

The drying tails of their shirts stick
\n  to their buttocks and thighs. Perhaps
\n    because of the shirts they feel undressed,
\n      retreat to the water. The water, like
\n        unseen fingers, passes over them.<\/p>\n

They wade on into a shaded, shallower reach
\n  of late afternoon, hear the clang
\n    of a distant bell. Some farmer\u2019s wife
\n      signaling an early supper. They climb out
\n        on the feminine side.<\/p>\n

They wait for the air to dry them. How long
\n  this single mile of fluvial walk
\n    has seemed, passing from present
\n      to pastoral to classical,
\n        back to the present again.<\/p>\n

They dress, turn toward the world of women
\n  where mother, sister, or wife waits. The day
\n    slides toward evening and the moon.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Professor<\/a>

Professor Emeritus of Biology Robert M. Chute is an award-winning Maine poet.<\/p><\/div>\n

N.B.: <\/em>Thoreau records his \u201cfluvial walks\u201d in the Journal<\/em> for 1852. He read Whitman\u2019s ‘Leaves of Grass,’ including, we assume, the song of the 29th bather<\/a> in 1856.<\/p>\n

Thoreau’s comment: \u201cAs for the sensuality in Whitman\u2019s ‘Leaves of Grass,’ I do not so much wish it was not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read it without harm.\u201d
\n 
\n 
\n 
\n 
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chute’s “Heat Wave in Concord” recreates a sizzling summer day in 1852 when Thoreau and a friend went on a “fluvial walk” in the Concord River. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":108657,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[11010,133,179],"tags":[7039,7522],"class_list":["post-108644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-creativity","category-language-literature","tag-poetry","tag-robert-chute"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108644"}],"version-history":[{"count":46,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108652,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108644\/revisions\/108652"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}