Walden by Haiku

The Pond in Winter

[70] The Pond in Winter a still winter night some question has been put to me my morning work I take an axe and pail and go in search of water through a foot of snow then a foot of ice window at my feet kneeling to drink I look into the parlor of the fishes heaven under our feet over our heads [71] ah! the pickerel of Walden! Walden all over Walden all through with convulsive quirks the pickerel give up their watery ghosts stories told of the pond’s bottomlessness they have no foundation remarkable belief the bottomlessness of the pond unsounded the pond deep and pure for a symbol not an inch can be spared one known fact the bottom of the pond the trend of its shores [72] wearing mittens a prudent man cutting ice to cool his summer drink ice-cutters unroof the house of fishes carting off their very air taking off the only coat the skin itself of Walden Pond the abode of winter blocks of ice packed in meadow hay Walden water reflecting clouds and trees evaporating [73] a solitary loon laughs a fisherman’s reflection a floating leaf the servant of Brahma our buckets grate together in the same well “The Pond in Winter” is the chapter I usually choose to show students the transcendental method of deriving spiritual lessons from natural facts. It’s the place where Thoreau is most meticulous about gathering data, and where the spiritual as well as physical depths of the pond, the book’s central symbol, are plumbed. But this brings us again to metaphor, central to Thoreau’s transcendentalist philosophy and to his style—but generally considered taboo in haiku. Actually, it’s not quite accurate to say metaphor is alien to haiku, since of course part of the yūgen of any haiku is likely to arise precisely from its metaphoric implications. And we could also note that, as Lakoff and Johnson have shown us, metaphor is pervasive in language and thought, so if you are using language, no matter how simple and straightforward it appears, undoubtedly metaphor is in there somewhere. It is there even in a word like straightforward, for instance, or even in in, in a phrase like in language, which implies the metaphor of language as container. (Note to structural linguists: I hope you caught the three ins in a row in that last line.) But it is also true that haiku typically does all it can to speak, if not absolutely without metaphor, at least without calling attention to it. And that, of course, is not at all true of Thoreau, whose thoughts are built around metaphor—or to put it another way [74] (and in another metaphor), whose thoughts follow paths of metaphor that can be long and meandering. Rochelle Johnson writes that Walden is so “saturated” with metaphor that it “calls more attention to [Thoreau] and his metaphor making than it does to the material world” (191, 200–201). Further, the book’s reliance on metaphor at times “leaves readers adrift in philosophizing to such a degree that the real natural world seems far gone,” turning the natural world into little more than “a vehicle for the making of allegory, analogy , and symbol” (200–201). Metaphors, says Johnson, are “as likely to partake of culturally-constructed systems of value as they are to convey fresh modes of perception,” and so Walden becomes complicit in leading us away from an understanding of natural phenomena rather than toward it (199). That’s a pretty good summary of all the reasons why haiku tends to avoid metaphor (though the haiku tradition typically avoids presupposing the binary opposition of nature and culture as mutually exclusive entities). But Johnson also credits Thoreau with a great deal of self-awareness in his use of metaphor, pointing out that he actively grapples with questions about how to write about nature and what role metaphor should play in the process. Johnson traces in Thoreau’s writings a change in his descriptive practices, culminating in the uncompleted 750-page Kalendar project, in which, over the course of several years, he recorded on lists and charts the dates of natural phenomena—noting each year just when leaves, blossoms, and fruits appeared, when the ice melted, and when certain birds returned to the...