Walden

As spring warms the water on Walden Pond, the ice begins to “honey-comb” and crack apart with “booms” and “thundering” (510) sounds. Thoreau describes this violent shifting and settling of the pond as an exciting rupture, a heralding of change.

All around the pond, life begins anew. Trees bud, and their buds burst into leaves. Sand flows through the streams and rivers, and Thoreau poetically compares “the silicious matter” to “the bony system” of the human body, “the still finer soil and organic matter” to “the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue” (520). He asks, “What is man but a mass of thawing clay?” (520). 

Thoreau returns to his regular practice of fishing on the pond. He also admires the woods and the animals, including the majestic hawk circling above him. The whole world seems to be teeming with life, as Thoreau remarks: “The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim” (527).

Thoreau closes this chapter by explaining that his second year on Walden Pond ends similarly to the first. He leaves Walden on September 6, 1847.

Thoreau opens with the platitude, “To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery” (541). He posits that a change of scenery means nothing unless accompanied by a change of soul. 

Thoreau explains that he is leaving Walden Pond to seek out new experiences. He advises readers to “advance confidently in the direction of [their] dreams” (547), and cast off excess possessions, luxuries, and material aspirations that get in the way of pursuing dreams. He concludes, “It is life near the bone where it is sweetest” (556), that the most profound human happiness can be found in simplicity. “Rather than love, than money, than fame,” he writes, “give me truth” (560). 

To illustrate his point, Thoreau describes grand parties he used to attend where “rich food and wine [were] in abundance […] but sincerity and truth were not” (560). He left these parties feeling spiritually hungry, only managing to satisfy this hunger by paring away the layers of his life. In Thoreau’s imagination, these parties—and the excessive consumption they represent—are like a murky bog. He reflects that one must independently seek the rock bottom of his own spiritual bog. He wryly muses, “Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface” (562). 

The book closes with a final urging from Thoreau to recharge our senses and cultivate awareness of the natural world around us: “Only that day dawns to which we are awake” (565).