Bullfrog

The Bullfrog is a conspicuous voice in the soundscape of Walden Pond, where its calls carry between shores and coves before dawn. Thoreau renders the frogs’ chorus as both natural-history observation and comic social scene: a succession of deep-voiced callers passes a guttural refrain around the misty lake, until daylight disperses the company. Their presence is part of the intimate, slowly acquired character of the pond, not a claim to wilderness grandeur.

Calls Across the Pond

The frogs sound alongside other distant noises, including dogs baying and a cow lowing in a barnyard. Against those scattered calls, the bullfrogs ring the shore with a sustained, booming chorus. Thoreau likens them to the spirits of ancient drinkers and revelers trying to sing together in a mythical underworld lake, while immediately qualifying the comparison: Walden has almost no weeds, though it does have frogs. The humorous allusion makes the animal’s voice vivid without mistaking the actual pond for the imagined setting.

The call becomes a kind of exchange across the water. One frog gives the repeated sound “tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk!” and a frog in a distant cove answers with what Thoreau calls the same password. The cry is repeated in turn by frogs of different sizes, from the largest and most distended to the least, in a sequence that makes the far-off shore seem to join the near one. The sound travels not as an isolated croak but as a chorus organized by repetition and response.

The Chorus and Its Comic Ritual

Thoreau develops the scene through mock social ceremony. A particularly large frog, with its chin on a heart-shaped leaf that serves as a napkin, takes a deep draught of the water it once scorned; its call then passes outward through the group. The frogs’ supposedly convivial rules, their round of calls, and their paunches are treated like the habits of drinkers at a noisy gathering. The joke depends on a reversal: the creatures seem to celebrate with the very water in which they live, while their calls supply the sound of a shared toast.

The refrain goes round repeatedly, from the most imposing caller down to the leakiest and least substantial, as though each must answer to prevent any mistake. But the ceremony is governed by the morning rather than by the frogs. When the sun disperses the mist, the others have gone beneath the pond; only the patriarch remains, still bellowing from time to time. The scene ends not with a final collective call but with the solitary persistence of that last voice, a comic image of a chorus outlasting its audience.

Place in Thoreau’s Account of Walden

The bullfrogs’ performance belongs to a close acquaintance with a lake whose attractions Thoreau says cannot much concern someone who has not frequented it or lived by its shore. Walden’s scenery, on his account, is beautiful but humble in scale, not grand. The frogs’ calls give that modest setting a distinctive life: the pond is a space across which sound moves, where a distant answer can transform separate banks and coves into a temporary gathering. Their prominence is therefore experiential as well as descriptive; the lake becomes legible through repeated attention to its local sounds.

Thoreau’s account is deliberately comic rather than a technical study of frog behavior. He records the call, its repetition, its apparent exchange between locations, and the change brought by sunrise, then extends those observations through images of drinking and communal revelry. The distinction matters: the frogs’ sequence is presented as something heard at the pond, while the drunken gathering is a figurative interpretation that animates the sound. The Bullfrog thus stands at the meeting point of field observation and imaginative analogy, its refrain lending a humble landscape the scale and character of an event.