| Term Paper Title | Gaining Insight On Death |
| # of Words | 609 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) | 2.44 |
Gaining Insight on Death
American Literature
Death has fascinated and fueled the imaginations of writers over the course of history. Several of the passages we read in this theme are linked by death. These poems call up a dramatic range of emotions from solitary sadness and dark despair, at one extreme, to hope, perseverance, and dreams of restful peace at the other.
The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, offers a simplified metaphor of the relationship between life and death. Against the eternal rhythm of the timeless sea, Longfellow writes of a traveler who is simply passing through, as we all pass through life. The traces his passage leaves are like footprints left on the shore, destined to last no longer than the next tide. So it is with the traces we leave behind on our world. Longfellow captures the beauty of the world in the sea-like rhythm of this poem, but there is a lonely, desolate feeling to the piece as well: “The day returns, but nevermore / Returns the traveler to the shore.”
In The First Snow-Fall, James Russell Lowell confronts death in its most tragic and personal dimension in the loss of two of his children. Unlike any of the other pieces, this poem presents death in the most immediate and painful way imaginable.
Lowell captures us with a mid-winter world transformed and made beautiful. Then, in this vision of perfect white, he pierces our hearts with “a mound… / Where a little headstone stood.” Yet, the sharp detail of the landscape and the scars of his tragic loss are made endurable by the fall of snow and the passage of time.
Oliver Wendell Holmes has mortality itself in mind, rather than personal loss, in The Chambered Nautilus. In five short stanzas, ...Read entire document
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