Wooden Topics

You think a wooden animal
is a simple thing;
it’s not.
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

From the foundation of a wooden observatory ... we could see Monadnock, in simple grandeur, in the northwest, rising nearly a thousand feet higher, still the “far blue mountain,” though with an altered profile. The first day the weather was so hazy that it was in vain we endeavored to unravel the obscurity. It was like looking into the sky again, and the patches of forest here and there seemed to flit like clouds over a lower heaven. As to voyagers of an aerial Polynesia, the earth seemed like a larger island in the ether; on every side, even as low as we, the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around it, a blue Pacific island, where who knows what islanders inhabit? and as we sail near its shores we see the waving of trees and hear the lowing of kine.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

In the graveyard, which was crowded with graves, and overrun with weeds, I noticed an inscription in Indian, painted on a wooden grave-board. There was a large wooden cross on the island.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)