Smoke

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

Credit

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 3, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Smoke” was included in Henry David Thoreau’s Poems of Nature (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1895). About the poem, scholar Sally P. Henson writes in her essay, “Thoreau’s Careful Artistry in the Poem ‘Smoke,’” published in The Thoreau Society Bulletin, No. 278 (Summer 2012), “In ‘Smoke,’ we see Thoreau, the poet-naturalist, fascinated by the qualities of one basic element in nature. Smoke is an intermediate form, hovering between a solid and gaseous state, an intermediary between earth and skies, earth and the sun. The one-sentence ‘Smoke’ describes a pillar of smoke rising from the poet’s hearth in a series of images ending in a command to the smoke to rise upward as the poet’s incense and ask the gods to pardon his clear flame—his uncluttered existence, his individuality, his own work on earth below.”