To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware.a
“Thanatopsis” is the poem that first brought Bryant recognition and it would remain his most famous poem. He completed a first draft when he was still a teenager and when his father sent them as submissions to North American Review, it was first published with an introduction composed by that magazine’s editors in a style contrasting sharply with Bryant’s own. Several years later Bryant would publish a significantly revised version which would replace both his and the editorial introduction with the lines quoted above. Critics have noted that the revised version is the work of a poet who had matured considerably during the interim between that first draft and the publication of a final version.
In the old mossy groves on the breast of the mountain,
In deep lonely glens where the waters complain,
By the shade of the rock, by the gush of the fountain,
I seek your loved footsteps, but seek them in vain.
Bryant’s admiration for Wordsworth is apparent in this poem which serves as the poet’s lament for the loss of the natural world to progress. As the speaker sets out to enjoy a nature walk, he cannot the evidence that his rural paradise is inexorably being given over to urban progress. Already, the path of his footsteps are becoming a dream doomed to being destroyed by the arrival of reality.
He, who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must trace alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
If “Thanatopsis” is Bryant’s most famous poem, it might well be argued that “To a Waterfowl” is high most admired. The poem is a case study in the means by which the nature poets constructed verse to allow what was observed literally to move naturally through analogy into a philosophical metaphor. In this particular instance, the flight of the titular bird and the “Power, whose care / Teaches thy way along that pathless coast” winds up as a symbolic incarnation of the trust one puts in God to guide them on their path through life.
Thy task is done; the bond are free:
We bear thee to an honored grave,
Whose proudest monument shall be
The broken fetters of the slave.
Like just about every other writer alive in America at the time, Bryant was moved to write an elegy upon the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Cullen was an outspoken opponent of slavery and used his position as editor of the New York Evening Post to propagandize the abolitionist cause. The result is that in addition to its call for collective mourning of a fallen leader, the poem singles out one specific accomplishment of the President as his signature defining triumph: the Emancipation of slaves.
