Mutability and Constancy
A close observer of nature who filled poem after poem with images of the world around him, Bryant was fascinated by the mutability of the world. At the same time, however, his close observation revealed to him that a sense of constancy existed that lent the world around him a sense of order and design that remained invisible to a doubtful mass of people for whom everything outside the control of man seemed to exist in an unpredictable sense of chaos. Bryant’s observation of that apparent chaos produced a number of poem featuring subjects varying from birds flying low over the horizon to the wind blowing in as darkness falls to fountains and trees and sky above revealed to him a constancy existing within the mutability in the form of fairly predictable pattern of climate and animal behavior that lent meaning and definition to variability.
The Age of Empires
A vogue among European artists and writer of the period was to look back upon the ruins of ancient empires that had left civilization in decay as the ones rose to take their place. Bryant directly addressed this theme relative to European history in his long poem “The Ages” delivered for a commencement at Harvard. Later he turned to America’s short history to discover the theme applied in a slightly different fashion: America itself was the new empire supplanting those of that Native Americans which had long ruled the wilderness in which the new nation was constructing its own imperial myths and legends. On this topic, “The Fountain” most directly addresses the theme of new empires being built upon the decaying ruin of previous civilizations.
Death and Mortality
Bryant literally began his career with a poetic manifestation of an obsession with mortality (“Thanatopsis”) and one of the last great long works of his career return to the topic to provide a mature examination of how one should accept the inescapable fact of mortality. Between these two career bookends can be found a career-long working out of that obsession fueled by poetic expressions of grief following the death of his wife and other family members. As he did with every other recurring theme, Bryant even managed to incorporate the concept of death and inevitable surrender to time into his poems about nature. This reliance on nature to answer questions posed on the subject of mortality created a body of work that is—for a poet—peculiarly absent meditations upon the possibility of immortality, thus leading to a general consensus that Bryant did not, in fact, believe in the possibility of an afterlife and thus the existence of all mortal creatures was analogous to the empires which lay in ruins: once gone, they were gone forever.
