Domesticity on Walden Pond

Abstract Much is made of the Iliad in Thoreau’s experiment in living at walden Pond, but very little of the table on which it sat. The volume of Homer’s epic on the three-legged table inside Thoreau’s ten-by-fifteen-foot house is just one of the Iliadic references that leads scholars of Walden to research Thoreau’s studies in classical Greek at Harvard College, to note his favorite edition and his enthusiasm for a heroic Homeric life, and to search out the many citations in Walden in order to debate the extent to which the text might be deliberately heroic and/ or epic (Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 6, 8, 9, 23; Johnson, “Revolution and Renewal,” 216-18). Thoreau’s table, however, has gone unremarked, though it too recurs in Walden, both in Thoreau’s inventory of furniture (which also includes his bed, desk, three chairs, and looking-glass), and again when he enjoys the table anew when placing it outdoors in the sunlight (Walden, III-I2). Indoors, we learn, the table occupies the single room that serves as kitchen, chamber, keeping-room—and parlor (242).