When I reread poets, I like to reread the same volume I first read. I like to see my old notes and the lines I underlined 10, 20, 30, 40+ years ago, and to add new marks and notes.

I do the same when I read the Bible. I have an old New Oxford RSV Bible I’ve had since 1982 (the one I picked up in another life when I was in seminary studying to be a pastor). It is filled with notes and underlined pages in various colors made over these many years.

For some reason, though, with Thoreau, I often feel that I want to start him again with a fresh set of eyes. To read him again as if for the first time. And so, more than any writer, I keep picking up another “new-used” volume, or repurchasing one that I had before but have, for some reason over the years, let go again.

Thoreau, like Yeats, is a spring eternal (at least for me). Another winter, and again I am reading Thoreau.