SOURCE: "'Visible' Images and the 'Still Voice': Transcendental Vision in Bryant's 'Thanatopsis'," in Emerson Society Quarterly, Vol. 22 (n.s.), No. 2, 1976, pp. 71-7.

Below, Budick demonstrates the relationship between images and ideas in "Thanatopsis, " which represents the complexities of man's apprehension of transcendent truths in natural images.

In moments of discursive simplicity, William Cullen Bryant felt certain that poetry was the optic through which man's otherwise restricted vision could be made to perceive the interpenetration of nature and that which is above nature:

Among the most remarkable of the influences of poetry is the exhibition of those analogies and correspondences which it beholds between the things of the moral and of the natural world. Irefer to its adorning and illustrating each by the other—infusing a moral sentiment into natural objects, and bringing images of visible beauty and majesty to heighten the effect of moral sentiment.

Undoubtedly many of...