Thanatopsis

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Thanatopsis

• By William Cullen Bryant

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Thanatopsis Literary Focus Theme

• The theme of a poem is what the poet is saying
  about life.
• Usually poets do not state their themes directly.
• Instead, you have to think about what all the
  words, images, and figures of speech say to you.
• The subject of Thanatopsis is what happens to
  people when they die.
• What the poem says about this subject is its
  theme.

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Thanatopsis Reading Skill Inverted Sentences

• William Cullen Bryant often makes use of
  inversion, a rearrangement of the usual word
  order in sentences.
• The usual order of words in Standard English
  sentences is subject, then verb, and then object
  Reika kicked the ball.
• An inverted order might be The ball Reika
  kicked.
• If you have trouble understanding sentences in
  the poem, try rearranging the words.

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William Cullen Bryant

• William Cullen Bryant was a Romantic Poet.
• In his time that title did not refer to a person
  who writes poetry about love.
• Instead, it referred to a poet who shows an
  emotional response to life.
• Romantic poets placed feelings above thought.
• They valued poetry and rural life above science
  and the city life.
• They believed that studying nature outdoors could
  bring as much truth to humans as doing scientific
  experiments.
• Thanatopsis is a nature poem in which Bryant
  presents his view (opsis, in Greek) of death
  (thanatos).

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Thanatopsis Poetic Form

• The poetic form that Bryant uses for
  Thanatopsis is blank verse.
• If you look at the lines of the poem, you will
  see that the lines do not rhyme.
• Most lines have the same number of syllables and
  a regular rhythm.

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Thanatopsis Into the Poem

• William Cullen Bryant was in his late teens when
  he wrote his first draft of Thanatopsis.
• He was looking for answers to how to accept
  death.
• He finds his answers in nature.
• He observes that when we die, we become a part of
  nature, along with everyone else who has already
  died and everyone who will die.