Reflection Blog- Thanatopsis

According to my literary criticism, Thanatopsis translates from Greek to mean "view of death" (Huff 1). When I began reading this poem and saw that it was about death, I kind of became more interested in it than I originally was. I thought it was interesting that William Cullen Bryant was bold enough to write a poem about the one thing that is guaranteed in our lives: death. I know that this is not true for everyone, but I think that it is safe to say that most people fear death and what happens after your final breath. I know that for me at least, death is kind of scary to think about. Its not something most people want to think about, so that is one reason I thought it was pretty cool that William Cullen Bryant wrote a poem all about death. In the beginning of this poem, it seems that the author thinks that death will not happen to him, but throughout the poem we see him come to terms with death and in the end he not only accepts death, but also he does not fear it. At one point in this poem, Bryant writes about the "narrow houses" that we are buried in after we die. Right after I read this, I thought that it was kind of creepy that he mentioned coffins in his poem, but eventually I saw the point he was trying to make. I think he was calling them narrow houses instead of coffins simply because narrow houses sounds a lot more inviting and less scary than what it is in reality. One of the big themes in this poem is that nature will always enforce the rule of mortality, and there is nothing you can do about it. One of the main things I took from this poem is that death happens to everything, plants, animals, humans, and that we are all part of the circle of life. Nature has a way of making things work out, and in order for everything to stay balanced things will always have to die. After reading this poem, I looked at things a little differently than I did before because this poem kind of makes you realize that everyone is going to die. No matter how much money you have, no matter how healthy you are, one day you are going to die and be buried on the same earth as everyone else. A few lines from this poem represent this point very well:

Thou shalt lie down with patriarchs of the infant world, -- with kings, the powerful of the earth, - the wise, the good, fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past... (Bryant 33-36).

I think that this poem is one of the best poems I have ever read, which really does not say much since I do not read poems but you get the point. I think that William Cullen Bryant is awesome for creating such a positive outlook on such a depressing topic. I think that this poem represents the Romanticism period because of the amount of description used in throughout the poem, and also because the topic of death is not something we ever looked at in the other periods.

Bibliography

Bryant, William Cullen. "16. Thanatopsis." Bartleby.com. Web. 12 Dec. 2011.

Huff, Randall. "'Thanatopsis'." The Facts On File Companion to American Poetry, vol. 1. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.