Thanatopisis

Running head : TRANSCENDENTALIST DEATHTranscendentalist conclusion in Bryant s ThanatopsisSteve SuttonEnglish 231 CProfessor FrelkeNovember 23 , 2007Transcendentalist last in Bryant s ThanatopsisWilliam Cullen Bryant s Thanatopsis is a romantic , democratic and triumphant imposture 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 set off the rebirth of the spiritual (the perfect . For Bryant , death is non interchange competent with putrefaction and degeneration . As character s mechanism , death signifies the re-integration of a lesser but no less priceless beness to the corkinger whole , the mighty sepulcher (line 37 . Here the romanticistic strain in Bry ant is visible : .Earth that sustain thee sh each(prenominal) claim / Thy yield to be resolved to earth once again .To swagger forever with the elements / To be a brother to the brute list (22-28The demise of the body is not an end , or damp 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 redolent of Donne s classic lament : Death thou shall dieThe afterlife , meantime , he sees as a reflection of the internal knowledge base in its consummate state . The domain of the jobless is immune 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 smoothen 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 material : .

and what if thou withdraw / In silence from the living and no friend / take note of thy departure (58-60 . The inevitability and necessity of mortality prove are consoling , assuring the soft that .all that breathe / Will share thy destiny (60-61 Bryant imagines an other-world society hold out With patriarchs of the infant world - with kings / The powerful of the earth - the wise , the built-in (34-35 , a potent manifestation of death as the great levelerThe extinction of the soulist self coincides with the dissolution of the super ficial , blemished and worldly personality - that is , the I detached from Nature . The individual becomes faceless - a return to the primal state . such(prenominal) civilise is not analogous with oblivion and non-existence . The dead whitethorn use up .lost each human trace surrendering up / Thine individual being (24-25 . But his or her presence and essence as intertwined with Nature remain : .yet the dead are there . In pause --the dead reigns there alone (54-57Bryant s view of death is advantageously 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 out a full essay, order it on our website: OrderEssay.net

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