Although its title suggests a travel narrative, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers focuses not so much on the actual two-week trip made by Henry and John Thoreau in 1839 (August 31 to September 13) as on journey into self, through nature, toward the infinite. It is an intensely cerebral, literary, metaphorical book, both long and dense. It is divided into an opening chapter and a separate chapter for each day of the week, Saturday through Friday. Thoreau compresses and distills the two-week trip to provide a structure that clearly suggests the passage of time. Approaching its writing as a work of literature rather than a factual account, he incorporates material drawn from journal entries written well after the trip. Although the narrative sections of each chapter present the landscapes, the people, and the plant and animal life encountered along the actual journey, there is little uninterpreted description within the book. Moreover, Thoreau intersperses much information drawn from local histories (particularly regarding interactions between Native Americans and English settlers); references to and quotations from ancient, medieval, and modern authors; previously unpublished and published poems and essays of his own (for example, his “Aulus Persius Flaccus,” published in The Dial in 1840, appears in “Thursday”; his poem “To the Maiden in the East,” published in The Dial in 1842, appears in “Sunday”); and long philosophical explorations. These seeming digressions, connected to the narrative by thematic threads, are, in fact, integral to the meaning of the book. Only the reader willing to submit to the flow of the author’s thoughts—as Thoreau surrenders himself to his journey on the rivers—can appreciate the richness and depth of A Week.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers begins with an elegiac invocation to the muse of Thoreau’s brother John. By maintaining John’s presence throughout the book and exploring the themes of friendship, the passage of time, death, and immortality, Thoreau transforms personal grief into understanding and acceptance of loss within a larger philosophical framework.
In “Concord River,” the opening chapter, Thoreau describes the river, evokes the Native Americans whose lives were intertwined with it long before the advent of English settlers, associates the Concord with the great rivers of this continent and others, and suggests the metaphorical nature of actual rivers as routes to the exploration of the unexplored territory in “the interior of continents.” He places the Concord within a universal context as a symbol of the flow of time and life toward the eternal. He represents weeds on the bottom and objects floating by as “fulfilling their fate,” and indicates his openness to what the river might teach in his resolution to “float whither it would bear me.”
The brothers’ journey begins in “Saturday.” They depart from Concord, “a port of entry and departure for the bodies as well as the souls of men.” On their first day, they travel as far as Billerica, Massachusetts. Thoreau describes what they see along the way, places the particular examples of humanity that they encounter within the all-encompassing scope of universal history, and likens life itself to a river, and the inevitable progress of a single life toward its absorption into infinity to the river’s flow. The chapter contains a lengthy and detailed catalog of fishes. Despite the fragility and expendability of individual fishes, the race endures through the far-flung dissemination of its seeds. The lives of countless fishes are wasted as a matter of course, but there is a kind of virtue in their instinctive willingness to fulfill the role that nature has assigned them. The place where the brothers camp at night is described in classically sylvan terms. Past and present are intermingled throughout the chapter, and the specific employed to reveal universal significance. “Saturday” concludes with a discussion of night sounds, described as evidence of nature’s health.
