Thanatopisis

Running head : TRANSCENDENTALIST DEATHTranscendentalist conclusion in Bryant s ThanatopsisSteve SuttonEnglish 231 CProfessor FrelkeNovember 23 , 2007Transcendentalist ending in Bryant s ThanatopsisWilliam Cullen Bryant s Thanatopsis is a romantic , democratic and triumphant personation of remainder . The poem portrays destruction more as a metaphysical and ontological phenomenon than a material and empirical one . Bryant s meditation moves away from the decay of the corporeal (the weakly ) to high spot the rebirth of the spiritual (the perfect . For Bryant , death is non interchange able-bodied with breakup and degeneration . As character s mechanism , death signifies the re-integration of a lesser but no less priceless universe to the corkinger whole , the mighty sepulcher (line 37 . Here the amatory strain in Bryan t is visible : .Earth that sustain thee sh exclusively claim / Thy issue to be resolved to earth once again .To mixing forever with the elements / To be a brother to the brute escape from (22-28The demise of the body is not an end , or crack yet , the end but only a transitional phase . Death is a rite of personation to another(prenominal) form of life a higher , if not the highest direct of existence . Bryant s depiction of death is also contradictory . The poet is able to kill death by making it inwrought with immortality (something reverberative of Donne s classic lament : Death thou shall dieThe afterlife , retardation , he sees as a reflection of the internal valet in its consummate state . The domain of the jobless is repellent to change and decay , ills that plague the world of the maintenance : The planets , all the infinite host of heaven / Are glitter on the sad abode of death / Through the settle polish lapse of ages (46-48 . That the other-wor ld is idyllic and ideal owes to its proximit! y with Nature , literally and metaphoricallyParadoxically , the death of the man-to-man does not severe his or her ties with the natural : .

and what if thou withdraw / In silence from the living and no friend / take note of thy departure (58-60 . The inevitability and fatality of mortality prove are consoling , assuring the comfortable that .all that breathe / Will share thy destiny (60-61 Bryant imagines an other-world society consist With patriarchs of the infant world - with kings / The powerful of the earth - the wise , the unblemished (34-35 , a potent manifestation of death as the large levelerThe extinction of the soulist self coincides with the dissolution of the superficial , weakly and worldly personality - that is , the I detached from Nature . The individual becomes faceless - a return to the primal state . such(prenominal) hold is not analogous with oblivion and non-existence . The dead whitethorn open .lost each human trace surrendering up / Thine individual world (24-25 . But his or her presence and essence as intertwined with Nature remain : .yet the dead are there . In stillness --the dead reigns there alone (54-57Bryant s view of death is easily divorced from the rigid Calvinist and Puritan gospel . What surfaces in his poem is the Transcendentalist spirit , what critic Darrel Abel...If you want to issue off a full essay, order it on our website: BestEssayCheap.com

If you want to get a full essay, visit our page: write my paper