Death

William Cullen Bryant’s poem is entitled “Thanatopsis,” a term derived from Greek that means a meditation or cognition on death. Aside from the title, the term “death” is only explicitly referred to twice in the poem (48, 77). However, images of shrouds, palls, coffins, suffocation, graves, silence, beds, sleep, eternal rest, caravans, and bodily decay appear throughout the verse. At first the poet describes these as images that “Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart” (13). But upon further explication, the speaker advocates for a calm acceptance of one’s mortality, suggesting that it is the apotheosis of mankind’s communion with the natural world.

The central tension in the poem concerns the conventional human anxieties over the dissolution of the subject upon death. The speaker describes death as a merging back into the substance of the earth, represented in various ways as an ingratiating and...