Pond

A pond is a body of standing water, either natural or man-made, that is usually smaller than a lake.

Monet, 1916-19: 'Water Lily Pond and Weeping Willow', oil-painting on canvas; current location: unknown - quote of Monet about his weak eyes, Jan. 1921: 'I see less and less... Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up... I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf'

Quotes

• ‘Aire? Bah! I cannot say it. Well, our ship stopped in themorning, before it was quite daylight, at a great city—a hugecity, with very dark houses and all smoky; not at all like thepretty clean town I came from; and Mr. Rochester carriedme in his arms over a plank to the land, and Sophie cameafter, and we all got into a coach, which took us to a beautiful large house, larger than this and finer, called an hotel.We stayed there nearly a week: I and Sophie used to walkevery day in a great green place full of trees, called the Park; and there were many children there besides me, and a pondwith beautiful birds in it, that I fed with crumbs.’
  • Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

• Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.
  • George Elliot, Middlemarch

• Condenses, and the cold environs round,
  Kindled through agitation to a flame,
  Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends,
  Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
  Misleads the amazed night-wanderer from his way
  To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool;
  There swallowed up and lost, from succour far.
  
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost

• The pond ... had become a magnet for attracting bats. And many other kinds of wildlife as well. Give a wild animal the habitat that it prefers, and you can expect it to show up sooner or later; over the years since digging the pond we had seen it draw in muskrats, snapping turtles, even otters. Fish arrived from somewhere—as eggs on the feet of birds?—and made themselves at home here. Then came a great blue heron to dine on them. Ducks began building nests; Canada geese began stopping by each spring and fall. The pond became a rest stop on their migratory journeys.
  • Don Mitchell, Flying Blind: One Man's Adventures Battling Buckthorn, Making Peace with Authority, and Creating a Home for Endangered Bats. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing. 2013. p. 22. 

• Si je désire une eau d’Europe, c’est la flache
  Noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé
  Un enfant accroupi plein de tristesses, lâche
  Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai.
  • If I want Europe, it’s a dark cold pond
    Where a small child plunged in sadness crouches
    One fragrant evening at dusk, and launches
    A boat, frail as a butterfly in May.
  • Arthur Rimbaud, Le Bateau ivre

See also

• Admiralty law
• Geography
• Navy
• Oceans
• River
• Sea
• Water
• Wind wave