Death Explored

Paper Summary:

The certainty of death causes many people to feel many types of emotions and to ask some of the most probing questions we will ever encounter. William Cullen Bryant, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe give us very different interpretations of death and how it relates to life. This paper examines how these poets perceive the universality of death and how they choose to find some sort of resolution to the unanswerable question: What happens to us after death?

From the Paper:

"William Cullen Bryant's Thanatopsis is a such a meditation. In fact, the title means "a meditation on death" (Webster). This narrator of this poem speaks to us in a gentle and reassuring voice, telling us that instead of fearing death, we should instead consider it a natural progression of life. Death is not something to anguish over and the narrator urges us to look to nature for a elevated perspective on the process of dying. Lessons can be learned from ?Earth and her waters, and the depth of the air--? (16). The poem is speaking to the one who is troubled by mortality, knowing that one day he or she will die and no longer see the "all-beholding" sun (18) and the "Earth that nourished thee, shall claim/They growth, to be resolved to earth again" (22-3). By consoling nature, the distressed individual can discover three consolations to inevitable death. (Magill) "

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