When I looked at this poem, the first thing that crossed my head was its length and the amount of time I would have to spend to analyze it. In the beginning, I really would have liked to read another Emily Dickinson poem for homework since her poems are mostly very short. But as I read more and more, I found that this poem, despite its length, is actually very interesting and easy to understand. Upon finishing my assignment, I interpreted and translated the contents of this poem into Bryant’s way to comfort those who are afraid of death.
In the beginning of the poem, Bryant describes how nature is able to take away the “sharpness” of your “darker musings” and lighten your spirits even when you think of death. He also says that nature will be there to hear you “list” your fears to her and that once you die you will be one with nature. And after comforting the reader with nature, Bryant moves on to say how once you die, you are buried with the most acknowledgeable and “powerful of the earth” thereby glorifying the eternal resting place of man. (Now, to one of my favorite parts of the poem) Bryant adds humor to this poem when he says “…what if thou shalt fall/ Unheeded by the living—and no fried/ Take note of thy departure? All that breathe/ Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh/ when thou art gone…yet all these shall leave…and shall come,/ and make their bed with thee” (58-66). Bryant is saying that even if you die alone without others sympathy, and even if others rejoice about your death, they will eventually join you in death. (I found this really funny, almost like the dead are saying “In your face for laughing at me, now you have to join me.”) Bryant ends the poem with how everyone dies and that death is like “[lying] down to pleasant dreams” (81).
After I read the poem and figured out the message it was trying to send, this poem became one of the best ones I’ve read this year. Unlike Dickinson, who generally describes death and the process of dying, Bryant took measures to comfort those who are afraid of death. He made it seem as if dying is a chance to stand at the same level as other great leaders of the past. Personally, I think it is harder to comfort than to describe. What do you think?
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Yes, the length of the poem did give me a scare as well, but like you said, it is actually a pretty well-composed poem. I guess why I was intimidated at first is the lack of white space. It would have been nice if there were stanzas or some sort of separation between certain sections rather than one long continuous stream of lines.
Although Bryant does bring up comforting aspects of death, I also feel it is a way of trying to demonstrate how death will happen to everyone and everything. However, his attempts of comfort are inviting and fun like being with the great leaders of the past.
I want to reply to your question: I think it's harder to comfort than to describe death in the modern society we live in today. There is so much that media and people get themselves hyped up for on earth that it is fearful to know that death can end all of that by a bullet, poison, or just by natural causes. To describe is simply analyzing and placing the events of death down on paper. Dickinson does a great job in not simply describing death, but also adding artistic elements to it. But even then, I feel as though trying to comfort people about death is very difficult due to the connotations people conjure about it.
That's my 2 cents.
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