Question

Has anyone read the book "The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail", a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee?

Answer 1

yeahhh

Answer 2

Can you help me with some questions? @Kayy_Best

Answer 3

Go for it.

Answer 4

your profile pic is creepy not to be rude though

Answer 5

Me? lol

Answer 6

no quick student

Answer 7

anyone there

Answer 8

@Kayy_Best

Answer 9

I am making a survey of how different people answer these questions. I'd like at least twenty people, so whoever you know that read this book, call them too.


Here are the questions:




1. How does the poem by wingspaninson relate to transcendentalism and this play?


poem:

The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --
For -- put them side by side --
The one the other will contain
With ease -- and You -- beside --

The Brain is deeper than the sea --
For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue --
The one the other will absorb --
As Sponges -- Buckets -- do --

The Brain is just the weight of God --
For -- Heft them -- Pound for Pound --
And they will differ -- if they do --
As Syllable from Sound --



2. Halfway through Act Two, Henry and Waldo quarrel bitterly about politics. Waldo rhetorically asks Henry: “Could your woodchucks, with all their wisdom, have saved [the murdered fugitive slave] Henry Williams? Are your fish going to build roads, teach school, put out fires?” (p. 88) Discuss these pointed questions as critiques of Henry’s way of thinking about life—and living it.


3. Reread the nightmare scene near the end and describe the main characters and primary events in Henry’s nightmare. (pp. 92-6) How does this scene in particular, and this play in general, as a work of protest against war in general? Do you recognize parallels or discrepancies between the war depicted in this drama and any other war(s) in American history? If so, identify these similarities or differences, and then discuss them.


4. In Act II, the Thoreau character takes Edward Emerson huckleberry hunting. What do you think huckleberry hunting means symbolically? What makes you think so?