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Walden Pond as a Symbol
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Thoreau's Walden has often been studied as a symbolic work exemplifying the romantic quest for rebirth. No one, however, has demonstrated that, like many other masterpieces of the period, its title identifies its chief symbol.My purpose is to demonstrate this point and show its significance for the work as a whole.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967
References
1 Henry Thoreau, Walden, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York, 1950). References to this work in the text appear as “W.”
2 Especially fine are Sherman Paul, The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration (Urbana, Ill., 1958), pp. 293–353; Sherman Paul, “Resolution at Walden,” Accent, xiii (1953), 101–113; Stanley Hyman, “Thoreau in Our Time,” Atlantic Monthly, clxxviii (1946), 137–146; R. P. Adams, “Romanticism and the American Renaissance,” AL, xxiii (1952), 424–428; William Drake, “Walden,” Thoreau, ed. Sherman Paul (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), pp. 71–91. Closest to my own reading is that in Kenneth Lynn, “Henry David Thoreau,” Major Writers of America, ed. Perry Miller (New York, 1962), i, 602–604, and especially the examination of Walden as “the record of a search for the buried life” in Charles R. Anderson, “Introduction” [to “Henry David Thoreau”], American Literary Masters, ed. Charles R. Anderson, et al. (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Toronto, 1965), i, 625–644. The present study was completed in its original form before I saw Professor Anderson's excellent chapter. I have altered my work only to note points Professor Anderson and I have in common and to present arguments where I differ from him. (My thanks to my colleague, Professor Mordecai Marcus, for bringing Anderson's chapter to my attention.)
3 Although Anderson, pp. 640, 643, and Lynn, pp. 602–604, recognize the fact. Other fine discussions of the pond as a symbol are Paul, The Shores of America; Paul, Accent; Lauriat Lane, Jr., “On the Organic Structure of Walden,” College English, xxi (1960), 195–202. On the pond as a symbol in all Thoreau's work, see Joseph L. Moldenhauer, “Images of Circularity in Thoreau's Prose,” Texas Studies in Lang, and Lit., i (1959), 245–263. Walter Harding, A Thoreau Handbook (New York, 1959), p. 163, says, “River and lake images are the most fundamental in Thoreau.”
4 Paul, The Shores of America; Paul, Accent; Hyman; Drake; and especially John Broderick, “Imagery in Walden,” Univ. of Texas Studies in English, xxxiii (1954), 80–88.
5 Or by his momentary identification with the cockerel, the bird of the morning (W, pp. 115–116) in a passage, part of which Thoreau intended as the epigraph for Walden. See The Variorum “Walden,” ed. Walter Harding (New York, 1963), pp. 255–256, n. 1.
6 Paul, Accent, p. 112, says Thoreau derived this idea from Goethe's well-known use of it. See also Paul, The Shores of America, p. 347, n. 222.
7 See Gerry Brenner, “Thoreau's ‘Brute Neighbors’: Four Levels of Nature,” ESQ, No. 39 (1965), p. 39.
8 Paul, The Shores of America, p. 334. Lynn, pp. 602–603, suggests Walden's participation in both the earth and the sky, nature and the divine.
9 Cf. Anderson, pp. 637, 644.
10 Moldenhauer, p. 249. Lynn, p. 602, calls the sun “the fundamental source of all transcendental correspondences between man and Nature” and discusses Thoreau's ambivalent attitude toward it in Walden. The association is clearest in W, pp. 36–37, 66–67, 76, 150, 170, 280–281, 297.
11 Walden is said to be most like heaven “in the intervals of a gentle rain-storm in August” when “the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself” (W, p. 78). It is called “Sky water” (W, p. 170) and a “Lake … of Light” (W, p. 180).
12 William Bysshe Stein, in “Thoreau's Walden and the Bhagavad-Gita,” Topic, No. 6 (1963), pp. 38–55, shows a number of analogies between the ideas of the two books.
13 Paul, The Shores of America, pp. 333–334; Anderson, p. 643. The quoted phrases are Anderson's.
14 Paul, The Shores of America, pp. 333–334. Anderson, p. 643, quotes only the first two lines. The quoted prose phrase is Anderson's.
15 Paul, The Shores of America, p. 333, says that Walden is the symbol of Thoreau's “real self.” See also Moldenhauer, pp. 249, 258. Anderson, p. 643, says that it is a “symbol—of the immanent God, or Over Soul, of Thoreau's own soul or transcendent self.” Walden is a symbol of Thoreau's soul but it is so because primarily it is—for Thoreau—the ultimate earthly image of a God who created everything, is reflected and perhaps embodied in his creation (and especially in the pond and—potentially—human beings), but who also exists independently of that creation
16 In ending the final prose passage with the proposal that Walden be called “God's Drop,” Thoreau reemphasizes the primacy of the pond's relationship to God over its relationship with himself or other men and also, by implication, the fact that the pond, though an image of God, is His creation and therefore a part of nature.
17 The accounts of Walden's structure closest to my own are those of Lane and Anderson.
18 Adams, p. 425, notes the alternation of chapters between “man and nature” and “individual and society” from “Reading” through “Brute Neighbors.” John C. Broderick, “The Movement of Thoreau's Prose,” AL, xxxiii (1961), 140, notes that, up to “Brute Neighbors,” these pairs have a rhythmic movement, alternating between an advance into spiritual experience and a retreat into the everyday world. Anderson, pp. 638, 639, 641, views the alternation as one of “society” and “solitude,” and finds it in the first six chapters and then more “faintly” in the next four, through “Brute Neighbors.”
19 Anderson, p. 636. Willard Thorp, “Reading Walden,” Report of the Eleventh Yale Conference on The Teaching of English, Master of Arts in Teaching Program, Yale University, 1965, pp. 15–16, makes the same point in the course of a different interpretation of Walden's structure.
20 Anderson, pp. 633, 637.
21 The structural centrality of “The Ponds” is noted by Lane, p. 200, Lynn, p. 602, and Anderson, p. 640. 22 Anderson, pp. 640, 639.
23 Anderson, p. 641, says that “Higher Laws” is “the exact complement to the … introductory chapter on the lower laws of economic man and fulfills its meaning by being its polar opposite.” The true complement of “Economy” is “The Ponds.” “Economy” presents Thoreau's criticism of the “lower laws” of economics through rational criticism, a proper mode for this level of reality. “The Ponds” presents his praise of the “higher laws” of spiritual man through imaginative (symbolic) embodiment, the proper mode for that level. “Higher Laws” is the abstract equivalent of “Economy,” not its “exact complement.”
24 There is an excellent discussion of the dualist Puritan and monistic pantheist tendencies in Thoreau in Joseph Wood Krutch, Henry David Thoreau (New York, 1948), pp. 167–215.
25 Edward J. Rose, in “The Wit and Wisdom of Thoreau's ‘Higher Laws’,” Queen's Quarterly, lxix (1963), 555–567, says that although Thoreau “desires that man pass through what he must condemn in the end, he asserts that man must pass through it so that he can leave it behind” (p. 565). This is true insofar as “what he must condemn” refers to the “wildness” Thoreau accepts at the beginning of the chapter. But it is not true of the “sensuality” that “wildness” becomes in the course of the chapter and which Thoreau totally condemns. Lynn, pp. 601–602, is closer to my view.
26 The praise of chastity is also foreshadowed in at least one other place in Walden, the final paragraph of “Economy,” where Thoreau tells the Persian story which purports to explain why the “cypress, which bears no fruit,” is the only tree called “azad, or free” (W, p. 71).
27 There is a suggestive attempt at such an analysis, in terms of Freudian psychology, in Carl Bode, “The Half-Hidden Thoreau,” Massachusetts Review, iv (1962), 68–80. (Lynn, p. 602, and especially Krutch, pp. 203–208, discuss Thoreau's “squeamish” attitude toward sexuality.)
28 There is a similar observation, differently interpreted, in Lane, pp. 200–201.
29 A particularly good illustration is his chasing the loon on Walden, described at the end of “Brute Neighbors.” But see n. 33.
30 Anderson, p. 640, notes that “wit and metaphor” subside into “simple description” in Thoreau's account of Walden in “The Ponds.”
31 Daisetz T. Suzuki, “Buddhist Symbolism,” Symbols and Values: An Initial Study, Thirteenth Symposium of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life (New York, 1954), pp. 149–154.
32 Broderick, “The Movement of Thoreau's Prose,” pp. 140–141.
33 However, Lynn, p. 603, suggests that “The loon … is the great embodiment of the spirit of the Pond,” and Brenner, pp. 37–40, takes Thoreau at his word and not only makes explicit correspondences out of these seeming descriptions but shows how, together, they make up a coherent and significant pattern. The result of his unprovable argument is an interpretation which is probably over-schematic but is still suggestive and valuable.
34 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (London, New York, Toronto, 1941), p. 169, notes how in the winter chapters “the radius” of Thoreau's “experience contracted then more and more to his immediate surroundings. However, the last pages on the pond deal with the cutting of the ice, and end with the sudden extraordinary expansion of his thought which annihilates space and time.”
35 Adams, p. 426; Lynn, pp. 603–604.
36 For the extent of Thoreau's identification with the seasons, see Reginald L. Cook, Passage to Walden (Boston, 1949), p. 158.
37 For this idea of the “Conclusion” as a return to civilization I am indebted to John Broderick, “The Movement of Thoreau's Prose,” and to Moldenhauer, pp. 261–262.
38 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (New York, 1960), esp. Chs. ix, x.
39 Ibid., pp. 315–317.
40 Moldenhauer, p. 247.
41 Matthiessen, pp. 115–119.