Category: Thanatopsis

The poem, Thanatopsis, written by William Cullen Bryant, is a wonderful literary work that explores the often controversial questions of death. Within his well written lines, Bryant attempts to show the relationship between deaths eternal questions and the ongoing cycle of nature and life. Upon concluding the poem many readers are able to reaffirm their…

‘Thanatopsis’ was written by William Cullen Bryantprobably in 1813, when the poet was just 19. It is Bryant’s most famous poem and has endured in popularity due its nuanced depiction of death and its expert control of meter, syntax, imagery, and other poetic devices. The poem gives voice to the despair people feel in contemplating…

In the speakers vision of death, nature plays a central role. Instead of dealing with abstract entities like God, angels, souls, or Heaven, the speaker focuses on the physical objects that make up the mortal world  think: dirt, rivers, trees. In doing so, the speaker suggests that human beings arent all that different from…