In the previous chapter, the narrator was finally not able to accept the way of life that the woodchopper represented. He admired the woodchopper's close ties with nature, but he saw it as a limitation that the woodchopper lacked the intellect, intuition, and imagination necessary for complete transcendence. The narrator wished to live a spiritual life, but he also wanted it to be a natural life — one that was intimate with earth, as well as with heaven. And thus we come to the profound value of growing beans: "They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus." (Antaeus was the son of the goddess of the earth and derived his strength from contact with his mother; Hercules could defeat him in battle only by lifting him from the ground, thereby cutting off the source of his energy.) This is one value that the narrator derived from working in his bean-field, and there are others. One is that his method of raising beans enabled him to establish a way of life in a state between wild, untamed nature and well-ordered civilization; in this way, he was able to derive what was of value to him from both worlds. From the world of man, he derived his occupation: cultivating the soil. But he attempted to remain as natural as possible by not manuring his fields or using any farm implements except a hoe. The parable is obvious enough. When the narrator says of his bean-field, "mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields," he is claiming that he was civilized to a degree short of the excessive artificiality and unnaturalness of society, and he was natural to a degree short of uncultivated, untamed wilderness. He sees himself, then, as a symbol of humanized nature and naturalized civilization. He has forged in his personality a link between two worlds and is able to enjoy the best of both worlds.
The reader should note above that the bean-field has been interpreted to signify the narrator's inner state. The bean-field remains a literal bean-field and a source of physical stimulation to the narrator, but it is also a metaphor for the narrator's self — a self that needs the simultaneous experience of nature and spirit, and of wildness and civilization. In the chapter entitled "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," the narrator parenthetically mentioned, "I have always cultivated a garden," the garden being a metaphor for his self. And at the beginning of "The Bean-field," he attempts to prod the reader into considering this significance of his "garden." He indicates that there is a deeper meaning to his bean-field by asking, "what was the meaning of this," "why should I raise them," and "what shall I learn of beans or beans of me?" That the bean-field has a spiritual significance is suggested offhandedly by his answer: "only Heaven knows." The narrator has come to Walden Pond to cultivate and improve himself and, with this in mind, we might profitably read his description of how he cultivated the "soil": "This was my curious labour all summer — to make this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse." With the narrator's process of inner development and perfection in mind, we can see the metaphorical significance of his assertion that cultivating a garden was his "day's work" in this "summer" of spiritual growth. As a cultivated garden gives birth to beans instead of weeds, the narrator's soul will develop finer attributes because of his efforts at self-culture. He is an artist creating, like a sculptor with his clay, a soul, making his self express its spiritual perfection.
