Walden

Thoreau wakes with the sensation that he has “some question” (479) to ask Nature, a question his dreams have not answered. He looks out over the frozen landscape, where the snow lies “deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed” (479). He feels this frozen scene is telling him, “Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask” (479). 

Every morning, Thoreau collects drinking water by chopping through the pond’s ice. As he bends down to drink, he observes “the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass” (480). Marveling at this underwater beauty, Thoreau reflects, “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads” (481). 

Ice fishermen gather on the pond, and Thoreau watches as they catch exquisitely colored pickerel. He also ponders the strange life-cycle embodied in the process of fishing: “The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisher-man swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled” (482). 

Thoreau questions the depth of Walden Pond, half-wondering whether it is as vast as locals believe or if “all ponds [a]re shallow” (486).