"The Ponds" can best be described as a cluster of metaphors which is designed to illuminate Thoreau's concept of the ideal self, or soul. He focuses the reader's attention on the self of the narrator by presenting a situation which the reader should find familiar. It is a dialectical situation, meaning that the narrator's self confronts two apparently opposite aspects of life which must be brought together — that is, synthesized or integrated. The narrator has presented such a situation three times previously: in "Sounds," he had to overcome the conflict between the world of Nature and the world of the Machine, represented by the noisy train; in "The Bean-field," he brought together, and made one, the world of Nature and the world of Civilization; and in "Visitors," he introduced through the character of the woodchopper a conflict which also begins this chapter. It will be recalled that the woodchopper was admirable because of his naturalness, yet he was not ideal because he lacked spiritual awareness. The narrator wants both of these qualities in his life; his self, he believes, should be both natural and spiritual (supernatural). He wants to bring together these two apparently opposite worlds of nature and spirit within his self.
At the beginning of "The Ponds," the narrator metaphorically informs us that he has made this synthesis within his self. He tells us that while fishing at night he felt this integration take place: "It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes, as it were, with one hook." He has his "lines" connected to the worlds of Nature and Spirit; his self has integrated the two. And note the locale at which the two "lines" meet: Walden Pond — the metaphor for the narrator's now integrated, now fulfilled self. Later, in a bit of verse, the narrator again indicates this metaphorical identification between his perfected self and Walden Pond: "I am its stony shore / . . . And its deepest resort / Lies high in my thought." At another point, he reemphasizes the fact that his soul, partaking of Nature and Spirit, is signified by a pond that is "intermediate in its nature between the land and sky."
