That make the meadows green and, poured round all, Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,-the vales The powerful of the earth-the wise, the good,įair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, With patriarchs of the infant world-with kings, Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wishĬouch more magnificent. Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould. Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,Īnd, lost each human trace, surrendering upĪnd to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, In all his course nor yet in the cold ground, To Nature’s teachings, while from all around-Įarth and her waters, and the depths of air. Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart. Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,Īnd breathless darkness, and the narrow house, Of the last bitter hour come like a blight In the meantime, he presents a vivid picture of a corpse’s decomposition and a grand view of an earth filled with the billions of bodies of those who have gone before.Ĭommunion with her visible forms, she speaks
ER SEASON 11 TIME OF DEATH HOW TO
In this poem, the seventeen-year-old Bryant instructs his readers in a little less than a hundred lines of blank verse how to live and especially how to die-cheerfully, he advises. This one belongs on the list not only for its own merits but also because it exerted a great influence on American letters, especially on American Romanticism, for several generations. “Thanatopsis,” by William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) Vincent Millay.ġ0 Greatest English Sonnets Concerning Other Poets 10. I know that such restrictions have necessitated my leaving out the greatest death poem of them all, Dante’s Comedia, as well as some fine twentieth-century poems by the likes of Wilfred Owen and Edna St. In compiling the list, I have restricted myself to short classical poems in English from a little before 1900. In view of the continuing popularity of that Unmentionable Topic, and for no particular reason, here is my list of the ten best poems about death. Poets demonstrably know nothing about death since it is, in Hamlet’s phrase, “the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.” Yet from the Egyptian Book of the Dead some 4,500 years ago to the latest agony in the current issue of your favorite literary journal, bards and lyricists have persistently speculated about death, called it both soft and bitter names, and expressed distress at its coming to call.
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