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This poem is showing the significance of following society's journey and ending up unhappy. The captain finally makes it back from a long journey only to realize he has nothing to come home to and worked so long, and in the end was left with nothing. This brings in the ideas of transcendentalism because it shows the pressure society can put on you, and in the end it will leave you miserable and unfulfilled. Following the ideas of transcendentalism, it would help you to learn more and be happy.

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O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up-for you the flag is flung-for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths-for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here Captain! dear father!

This arm beneath your head!

It is some dream that on the deck,

You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

But I with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

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O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman | Poetry Foundation

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O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

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I took this picture on my trip to Haiti two years ago. This trip allowed me to follow many teachings of Transcendentalism. It allowed me to be without any connectivity of peers and friends. It helped me think and learn on my own, without a formal school setting. I was able to see different things and experience a new country without societal pressures.

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This article challenges the well known belief that Henry David Thoreau was alone at Walden. This article says that Walden was a place for outcasts and misfits. He was among many who were similar to him, and that Walden was in fact not far from civilization at all. The article goes on to talk about the people Thoreau would have actually interacted with. It makes the reader think and consider a new idea of the influence on Thoreau and his teachings.

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The Stone

By John Kaag and Clancy Martin

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Credit Credit Library of Congress

He lived on an acre just above Walden Pond. He had a small garden, survived off the land, and enjoyed the wild apples that still grew around Concord, Mass., in the 19th century. He stayed near Walden because it was here that he could be most free.

His name was not Henry David Thoreau.

Brister Freeman was a black man, one of the original inhabitants of Walden Woods. As Laura Walls tells us in her new biography of Thoreau, Freeman fought in the Revolution, and afterward "declared his independence through his surname," but "unable to prove his freedom outside of Concord, he bought an acre on the hill north of Walden Pond, Brister's Hill." Today, Walden is preserved as a state park, and is a Registered National Historic Landmark, and so long as visitors can find parking, they come and go as they please - as did Thoreau - but many of his neighbors couldn't.

On Thoreau's 200th birthday this July he might want us to remember the men and women, largely unacknowledged by history, who were confined to this paradisiacal corner of the earth. It was, indeed, a sanctuary, but for many of Thoreau's companions freedom was narrowly circumscribed. Their world was, according to the historian Elise Lemire, the " Black Walden," a place of not-so-quiet desperation.

For consumers of conventional history, it is easy enough to fall into the impression that Thoreau was the only person at Walden, that the pond was a pristine tract of wilderness. It wasn't. Walden was just beyond the bounds of civilized convention - which meant that it was a place for outcasts. Thoreau knew this, and willingly lived among them, those who had been barred from the inner life of many wealthy suburbs of Boston.

The self-imposed austerity that we often associate with Thoreau's tree-hugging ways was, in fact, a means of understanding those individuals who had to eke out a meager existence on the outskirts of society. This does not make Thoreau a saint, but it does suggest an intimate connection between Thoreau's retreat to the woods and his ability to understand those suffering under the conditions of oppression.

So who exactly were Thoreau's neighbors?

As Lemire and Walls discovered in researching Thoreau, these individuals embodied the fraught history of race in the Americas. Brister Freeman's sister, Zilpah White, was also a freed slave. After the Declaration of Independence was defended, she lived on the edge of Thoreau's famous bean field, the place where he toiled for two years in the hopes of realizing Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance," the rare and difficult act of supporting oneself.

Lemire explains that Zilpah White did it without fanfare. She wove linen and made brooms for a living. Arsonists burned her house down in 1813. She managed to escape the fire, but her dog, cat and chickens died. She rebuilt her home. But her life - and life for women like her - didn't have much in common with Rousseau's Romantic ideal of the state of nature.

And then there were the pale-faced, redheaded citizens of Walden Woods who didn't quite get to be white, the Irish. The Irish immigrants who came to the United States in the first half of the 19th century were, for the most part, ghettoized in the borderlands of society. Thoreau, however, sustained long and meaningful relationships with the many Irish immigrants who came to live and work on the railroad line near Walden.

Walls discovered that Thoreau met an ailing Irish ditchdigger named Hugh Coyle and offered to show him a clean spring that ran near Brister's Hill. But the old man was too sick to make the short trip. He, like so many Irish near slaves, drank himself to death in abject poverty.

By the time Thoreau came to Walden on July 4, 1845, most of America's untouchables were gone, but the traces of former slaves, squatters, immigrants and day laborers were everywhere. John Breed, another impoverished worker on the outskirts of Concord life, lived in a small house just a stone's throw from the pond. In Walls's words, "Local boys burned it down in 1841." At the age of 24, Thoreau raced from Concord to watch the fire, and conversed with Breed's distraught son the next day. By that time, Breed himself was already dead: he too died drunk on Walden Road in 1824.

Thoreau was aware of the proverbial "nobodies" who occupied, and in many cases laid claim to, the land that he would later inhabit. Ralph Waldo Emerson purchased the cheap, mostly unoccupied and abandoned land around Walden where Thoreau would make his famous home from Thomas Wyman, a potter. Emerson would soon after invite Thoreau to build his writer's retreat on this acreage. But before he did so, in April 1845, Thoreau bought the shanty of James Collins, a man who, Walls says, was an "Irish railroad worker moving up the line." Thoreau paid $4.25 for the house (about $150 today). At dawn, the Collinses moved out, all of their belongings wrapped tidily in a small single parcel. Thoreau disassembled their shanty, bleached the boards, and used them to construct his cabin in the woods.

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity" - Thoreau embraced Spartan living as a matter of choice, but the irony of him tearing down a shed in pursuit of his much-celebrated modest way of life is a bit painful. It's easy for us to judge Thoreau today; the privileged white man who plays at living austerely (choosing some "alternative way of life" that has been imposed on others) is a familiar target. But Thoreau himself was aware of this. Walls, for example, believes that Thoreau was probably helping the Collins family escape a lien on their house.

Thoreau recognized that he had every advantage; he also knew that the disadvantaged went, generally speaking, unnoticed by people of privilege. Social justice was in no small part a matter of counteracting this myopia, of recognizing suffering of others hidden in plain sight.

For Thoreau, what keeps the rich from understanding the plight of the poor is, in part, the fact of their richness, their stuff: not just metaphorically or conceptually, but literally. It's hard to understand the inner lives of others if you're always going shopping or looking after your household business or rushing off to parties. To "live deliberately," in Thoreau's words, was to wrest oneself from the diversions of this rat race, to understand the difference between the seemingly urgent matters of spending and acquiring and the truly significant ones of caring and thinking.

"Do not trouble yourself much to get new things," Thoreau instructs us. "Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts." To be free from the distractions of modern life - of the endlessly diverting display of the ordinary, social world of stuff, stuff and more stuff - allowed a person to focus and think. What could we think if worldly possessions didn't occupy our thoughts? What and whom could we attend to if we stopped attending only to ourselves?

Thoreau is often portrayed as a hermit, a lonely individual who rejected all forms of community. He was, in truth, happy enough to abandon the formalities and luxuries of conventional life, but only in an attempt to participate in a wider natural and social order.

This was a man who communed with the trees, spoke to bean fields, and conspired with the rain and sunshine that fed his crops. Yes, he had woodland friends. Many of his human companions were equally unusual: John Breed's son, a day laborer, who lamented the destruction of his boyhood home; Perez Blood, the eccentric astronomer who Thoreau visited repeatedly on the outskirts of town; Sophia Foord, the brilliant spinster who fell in love with the one man, Thoreau, who rivaled her in peculiarity; the unnamed fugitive slave whom Thoreau escorted to the railroad station so that he could make safe passage to Canada. Countless others.

Part of embracing Thoreauvian wilderness is to open ourselves to individuals and groups who exist beyond the town limits. These were outsiders, unknowns, even outcasts, and Thoreau acquainted himself with them, came to understand them and spent part of his life caring for them. Thoreau entreats us to open our eyes to everyone. If he appears reclusive perhaps it is because we fail to see the significance of his companions - it is perhaps because we are not ourselves reclusive enough, or, for that matter, social enough in the Thoreau's peculiarly intimate way.

In 1945, a century after Thoreau made his home on the banks of Walden Pond, Ralph Ellison began to write "Invisible Man." "I am an invisible man," Ellison's black narrator explains. "I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

This refusal, whether conscious or not, is nonetheless, strategic: a way to superficially erase the injustice that silently underpins progress and affluence. The Native Americans of the Merrimack Valley vanished first to make way for the settlers - then the workers and slaves who supported the nation and the even-then-affluent Concord. What remains is the myth of the rugged, forward-looking individual fitted precisely to a country that would rather not retrace its questionable history. This, however, was never Thoreau.

"There are few things "in this world as dangerous as sleepwalkers," Ellison wrote. Eyes closed, oblivious to the world, they proceed at their own peril, but more tragically, the peril of invisible others. If you rise before the sun and travel to Walden Pond, it is easy to understand the advantages of keeping your eyes open. We must, according to Thoreau, "reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep."

To take Thoreau's example, however, is not simply a matter of appreciating the natural world, of taking careful note of every woodchuck and birch. It also involves looking into the trees, into the near darkness, to discern the hidden, human figures who silently abide there. And slowly disappear.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Walden Pond as a national park. It is a Massachusetts state park and a Registered National Historic Landmark.

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Opinion | At Walden, Thoreau Wasn't Really Alone With Nature

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The Stone By John Kaag and Clancy Martin He lived on an acre just above Walden Pond. He had a small garden, survived off the land, and enjoyed the wild apples that still grew around Concord, Mass., in the 19th century. He stayed near Walden because it was here that he could be most free.

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I created this wordle to show the key ideas brought in by transcendentalism.  Thoreau and Emerson have taught us these ideas of self-reliance, and self discovery through living alone in seclusion, and emphasize the effects of these actions.  Learning and education is something that they both believe should follow these ideas.  My wordle brings all of these ideas together and presents it in a more unique and exciting format.

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"Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify."
Analysis: One big belief presented through Transcendentalism, is the idea that we should live our lives in a more simplified manner. Thoreau is saying that we live our lives with lots of detail, and should let go of all that pressure and precision. Simplifying our lives will bring us better understandings of our surroundings, and help us learn more than just something from the classroom.

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"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
Analysis:  Throughout our study of Henry David Thoreau, we have learned his specific ideas of education and learning. He preferred to learn through nature, and teach his students through what you would see in your surroundings. This quote brings in the idea of interpreting what you see around you, and not just looking at it.

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"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
Analysis: This quote from Emerson shows his ideas of nonconformity and creating something different for yourself. When he mentions the idea that you should leave your own path, it also brings in his ideas of self-reliance. The beginning of the quote also says that you should not go where the path leads you, and this shows the idea of society pressuring you to do certain things.

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This video explains the overall ideas of transcendentalism. It explains in detail the major leaders of this movement, and their influence on society. It thoroughly gives the background, history, and beginning of this thought process. I think this video helps to see the big picture when it comes to transcendentalism and its belief systems.

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This podcast brings the idea of nature into a different perspective. "Nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls." This quote shows the main idea portrayed by Gura through this podcast.

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Philip Gura's American Transcendentalism

Emersonians, awake!

Evening Grosbeaks & American Dawn

You regulars from the comment thread know who you are: mynocturama, peggysue, bobby, allison, nother and of course, potter, among the vast and various summer circle ...

We're wallowing in the transcendent mystery of things with Philip Gura, the author of American Transcendentalism: A History. Gura is an eminent professor of literature and culture at the University of North Carolina, but he's also "one of us," avid in the non-dogmatic, non-exclusive pursuit of the ecstatic, the invisible, the divine.

Toward the end of this conversation, Philip Gura explains how it began for him, 44 years ago. He was a child in Ware, Massachusetts, the son of immigrant mill folk, when he came upon a nest of "huge, garrulous, yellow birds eating choke cherries." When he wrote to the American Museum of Natural History for help identifying his find, the great ornithologist Dean Amadon wrote him directly to say the birds had to be evening grosbeaks, cousins of the goldfinch.

Naturalist and Prophet: HDT

Birds and New England nature led to Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau led to the genius moment and the genius cluster of the American renaissance in Concord - writers, thinkers, social consciences that to this day "represent something about our past that we want to be part of" and a key that perhaps hasn't been turned all the way in the door of American life.

The insistent voice of Mary McGrath asks, as always: "Okay, Chris, what's the question for listeners?"

Okay, Mary, here it is: Do the mostly sectarian, literalist and Fundamentalist questions around our politics of 2008 prove that transcendentalist impulses thrive - or expired long ago? Does the tempest that Mitt Romney, for example, has stirred around himself and his Mormonism mark a dismal falling-off - or rather an amazing continuity - of the old transcendentalist passion about faith, spirit and the religious underpinnings of this nation's life. Extra points for apt Emersonian quotes. And extra-extra points for apt quotes from other than Emerson.

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Emersonians, awake! Evening Grosbeaks & American Dawn You regulars from the comment thread know who you are: mynocturama, peggysue, bobby, allison, nother and of course, potter, among the vast and various summer circle ... We're wallowing in the transcendent mystery of things with Philip Gura, the author of American Transcendentalism: A History .

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This image portrays the idea that nature can shape our ideas and create us into the people we become. The idea that the branches in the picture creates a face shows this emergence into nature. The face shows a girl who is formed with the branches and leaves of the tree. The fact that the image is in black and white brings in an additional element of mystery.

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The image shows the complexity of our mind and the ideas that fill it. The little boy is shown with many aspects of nature filling his mind. It consists of flowers, rocks, trees, aspects of water, and a few animals. This follows the ideas of transcendentalism because it shows the blending with nature, and the fact that you can learn many things through exploration.

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Song 3-- "Call It What You Want"-- Foster The People

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Song 3-- "Call It What You Want"-- Foster The People

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Lyrics: "Yeah we're locked up in ideas
We like to label everything
Well I'm just gonna do here what I gotta do here
'Cause I gotta keep myself free"
Analysis: Throughout this song they explain the fact that we follow all the ideas we are told , and do not think for ourselves. It keeps us all thinking the same, and does not allow for us to be ourselves freely. The song pushes the idea that we have to find and believe on our own, instead of believing everything we are told.

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Song 2-- "Colors of the Wind"--Judy Kuhn

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Song 2-- "Colors of the Wind"--Judy Kuhn

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Lyrics: " Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon
Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned
Can you sing with all the voices of the mountains
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind
Can you paint with all the colors of the wind"
Analysis: This song embodies Thoreau's ideas on emergence into nature.  The song makes the audience think and ponder on the idea that they should bask in nature listen to their surroundings.  This idea of listening can be seen in the lyrics "the voices of the mountain sing."

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This article from the Washington Post shows the comparison of transcendentalists from the time period of Thoreau and Emerson, to the present time situation.  It explains that the idea of selfies and how we are looking at them all wrong.  It says we should look into the lens of who will see the image next, instead currently we just look at ourselves.  The article refers to this exchange as 'selfie'-reliance.

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There is a time in every man's day when his Facebook feed spits out a photo of a friend who has turned a smartphone camera on him or herself. There is the practiced tilt of the head, to avoid additional chins. There is the palm tree or infinity pool in the background, to record momentary privilege. There is the artfully arranged cleavage, or the casually flexed triceps, to establish oneself as fit, desirable, deserving of exhibition in the carousel museum of social media.

We click "like," or we narrow our eyes in dislike, and then remember our Emerson.

"Envy is ignorance," he wrote in his essay "Self-Reliance," and "imitation is suicide."

Regardless, "selfie" is the Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year, chosen partly because its usage spiked 17,000 percent since this time last year. We have become selfie-reliant, and now the lexicon has wholly absorbed the modern way to label the ancient fascination with self. But are modern selfies, uploaded onto Instagram by the millions, corrosive in a way that finer self-portraits are not - the oil-on-canvas selfies of Frida Kahlo, say, or Australian gunner Thomas Baker's 1917 Kodak portrait of his mirror image in uniform?

The practice of self-portraiture has never been cheaper or wider. The #selfie hashtag on Instagram summons a torrent of self-portraits, ranging in style from glamour shot to mugshot. Now we are a mob of self-portraitists. The total democratization of an art form either destroys it or ennobles it, and the selfie is either a pure expression of self or the surrender to conformity.

Depends on your artistic standards, and your tolerance for psychobabble.

Selfies are a form of vernacular photography, like amateur daguerreotype or Polaroid, says Alicia Eler, who writes routinely about selfies on the arts Web site Hyperallergic, and the prevalence of the artistic tool (the smartphone) doesn't diminish the value of the work.

"I think the self-portrait and the selfie are for anyone who's continuously documenting the act of becoming," she says. It's not self-obsession, though. It's a way to connect.

Such portraiture on social media is as good for self-empowerment as it is for self-objectification, psychologist Sarah J. Gervais writes in Psychology Today.

Though it's possible for people to take an unhealthy "outsider's perspective of their bodies," Gervais says, she suggests "that Instagram offers a quiet resistance to the barrage of perfect images that we face" in the traditional media.

Parse them any which way, and realize that we have come to rely on selfies. Selfies say "I was here, in this state, at this point in time." Selfies say "I'm not alone because I can share my aloneness."

We're not narcissists, as the curmudgeonry claims.

We are transcendentalists with iPhones.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose marquee essay is titled "Self-Reliance," would have been a habitual selfie-taker. The transcendentalists meticulously journaled about themselves and shared passages with each other. They prized the notion of the individual and his or her capacity for self-definition.

Emerson "says the mark of wisdom is seeing the miraculous in the commonplace, and showing ourselves to each other because we find something of worth in ourselves," says Philip F. Gura, professor of American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In this way, each selfie is one more breath blown into "the Oversoul," which Emerson defined as the "common heart," as individuals knit together in the ether. He could have been writing about the Internet and social media, in which case he would have cautioned against modeling yourself on others, which "loses your time and blurs the impression of your character."

"But do your work, and I shall know you," Emerson wrote. "Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself."

If Emerson were writing "Self-Reliance" today, he might have added this instruction to his essay: If you do take a selfie, don't look at the image of yourself on the screen as you snap the photo. Your eyes will be looking in the wrong direction. Instead, look into the lens itself, into the other soul who will soon be looking back at you.

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Selfie-reliance: The word of the year is the story of our individualism.

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There is a time in every man's day when his Facebook feed spits out a photo of a friend who has turned a smartphone camera on him or herself. There is the practiced tilt of the head, to avoid additional chins. There is the palm tree or infinity pool in the background, to record momentary privilege.

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This image fully embodies the idea of Transcendentalism.  It shows two men discovering and learning through their surroundings and environment.  It shows the process of thought that requires one's self and mind to connect with new developments and be self fulfilled. Being in nature is a big push in transcendentalism and is vividly shown through this image.

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“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
Analysis: This quote defines transcendentalism because it discusses the idea of conformity and being unique. The quote states that the world is going to try and create something less important as your greatest accomplishment.  Emerson then explains that you have to go against that and define something yourself that is truly your greatest accomplishment.

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Lyrics: "Don't let what they say keep you up at night, And we don't let nobody bring us down No matter what you say it won't hurt me"
Analysis: This song talks about nonconformity, and being yourself.  It highlights the fact that society might keep you from wanting to do what you want with your life.  The songs meaning comes when it explains how you should not listen and be yourself.