E.B. White: "Once More to the Lake"

In an inevitable cycle of life and growth, a father and his son visit a lake. Sacred to the father, the lake holds a special place in his heart; years ago, he spent summers at the same lake with his father. Nostalgia arises as the narrator and his son perform the same tasks as the narrator did with his father: fishing in the lake, seeing a dragonfly, and meeting the waitresses. Throughout the trip to the lake, the narrator realizes the changes of the people and buildings, though the lake continues to stay the same: placid and holy. Nature’s timelessness is compared to the inevitable cycle of growing up. 

E.B. White wrote Once More to the Lake in his farmhouse in North Brooklin, Maine, that overlooked the sea. Published in 1941, his essay discusses how mortality is inevitable.The essay is centered around White himself and his son, Joel. The thoughts that the father had in the essay is from White himself, who was having difficulty discerning the past from the present. Once More to the Lake is an essay from White's personal experience at a lakeside resort.

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White shows through the thoughts of the narrator how people and technology changes, yet nature offers a never-changing, timeless view. The lake has stayed the same, through the waitresses, transportation, and the people visiting change. The narrator holds onto the similarities that he notices of the lake, yet as the story progresses, he realizes that things have changed. The father attempts to draw parallels between himself and his son by fishing, the dragonfly, and taking a swim in the lake, yet when he says, “as he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death” (185), he has understood that he is no longer a young boy, but that his time of death will soon come too.

To illustrate the comparison of the past and the present, which is something that the narrator struggles with, White uses juxtaposition. An example of juxtaposition is seen when E.B. White writes, “In those other summertimes all motors were inboard…the noise they made was a sedative, an ingredient of summer sleep…But now the campers now all had outboards. In the daytime, in the hot mornings, these petulant, irritable sound” (183).  In this example, the narrator notices the change of sound. Technology has developed and the world is still revolving. From the trip to the lake, the father learns how his time as a child has passed. Seeing his own son, the father realizes how he will soon grow older and come to pass just like his own father.