Winter finally passed, and spring came in, dramatically announced by the audible breaking-up of the Walden ice. The narrator felt his own spiritual "thaw" and revitalization coming on, and he further describes the pond's thaw in terms of this feeling — "it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing tumult." It was not many days before the thaw was completed in the pond; soon all of nature surrounding the pond began to show signs of its annual rebirth. And as would be expected, the narrator grew ecstatic as he witnessed these signs of nature's new vitality.
One phenomenon of nature's thaw which particularly stimulated the narrator's imagination occurred in the railroad bank that ran along one side of the pond. As he viewed the thawing sand and clay flowing down the bank like lava, running into various forms, it seemed as though nature was visibly expressing its new life, as though organic, living things are being created out of inorganic, dead matter. Thus he came to feel that the world was once again being created, as though for the first time. The narrator keenly feels that he was deeply involved in this rebirth, this re-creation, for what is the truly inspired man "but a mass of thawing clay" flowing out of his wintry state of spiritual frigidity and rigidity into a new form of life?
