5. Conclusion, lines 64-70: the forest is the resting-place for Freedom in the intervals of his struggle, it being the primal home and present abode of liberty.

II. Study the poem in detail.

Topics 1 and 5. The introduction and the conclusion may be considered together rhetorically. The former, particularly, describes the forest by means of specific nouns and epithets. The age of the forest (line 10) explains the descriptive element of the conclusion (lines 66-70).

Topic 3. Lines 33-47 may next be considered, as standing nearer the title of the poem than the second and fourth paragraphs. Freedom should rule the human race by right of birth he is older than usurping Tyranny, his enemy. He began with the beginning of the race, and has gone with the race through its history. Lines 34-40 allude to the pastoral period of our race's history. Pastoral peoples, watching their flocks by night (for darkness brings the wild beasts), have always been astronomers; and in poetry shepherds are always represented as playing on the "reed." (See the story of Pan, god of shepherds, and the nymph Syrinx.) Also, pastoral peoples are obliged to fight the wild beasts that would decimate their flocks. Lines 40-42 refer to the early agricultural period of our race's history. Tyranny, being younger, is, by the law of primogeniture, a usurper, if he takes the place of the elder. Does he feel secure in his wrongfully obtained position?

Topic 2. (Lines 13-32). The whole of the poem proper is an apostrophe to Freedom. The French emblem of Freedom is a young girl in a Roman cap. The poet rejects this metaphor; he conceives Freedom as a warrior, fighting (lines 17-22). Power (called "Tyranny" in line 42) has attacked Freedom. "Thunderbolts" and "lightnings" sug

gest Zeus, who is regarded as a tyrant in the story of Prometheus. Power makes Freedom prisoner, but Freedom escapes and rallies the nations around his standard. The "swart armorers" are smiths (black-smiths), whose work in early times included the making of armor. Throughout this paragraph Freedom is represented as struggling against the force of the enemy in warfare and battle. He may be conquered for a time, but his immortal strength finally puts the enemy to flight.

Topic 4. (Lines 48-64). Here Freedom is represented as fighting against the enemy's cunning - the weapon of the weak and failing. Tyranny sets traps and ambushes, if perchance he may take Freedom unawares. Lines 53-59 refer to pleasures and rewards tyrants, or would-be tyrants, have sometimes prepared for their slaves. Roman history, for example, tells how food was distributed to the populace, and how they were entertained by spectacles when would-be tyrants were trying to gain power over them. Can you give from history any other illustration for these lines? Lines 59-64 warn Freedom to be prepared for these cunning attacks of his enemy. "Tumult" and "fraud” in line 65 recall the ideas of "force" (lines 21ff.) and "cunning" (lines 50ff.).

III. Discuss the sentence-structure in this poem. What is the effect of inversion in lines 27-28, 34-35, 42-45, 4547?

IV. Discuss the meter, and the use of run-on lines and pauses.

V. What devices do you find in the poem for securing melody and harmony?

VI. Read the poem aloud. Try to bring out fully its meaning, beauty, and strength.

THANATOPSIS

I. When Bryant was a young man of twenty-three, his father found in his desk the verses which now appear as Thanatopsis, lines 17-66. Mr. Bryant gave the lines to his friend Mr. Phillips, then editor of The North American Review, and they were published in that magazine in September, 1817. They are supposed to have been written some five or six years earlier. Lines 1-17 and 66-81 were added by the poet in his volume of 1821. See Godwin I, 97–101, 148-155.

II. The title of the poem is from the Greek, and means "a vision of death." One should read first the original lines (17-66), which are the core of the present poem. The poet conceives the earth as a splendid tomb for man, and the beauties of nature as decorations of that tomb. He meditates on the universality of death. This seems a strange topic for the meditation of a young man of healthy mind; but we know that "graveyard poems" occupied a prominent and honored place in English literature of the late eighteenth century. Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is the best known of these poems. Another, which seems particularly to have influenced Bryant, is Blair's Grave. See Godwin I, 37, 97.

What is this world?

What but a spacious burial-field unwalled,

Strewed with death's spoils, the spoils of animals
Savage and tame, and full of dead men's bones.

The very turf on which we tread once lived,
And we that live must lend our carcasses
To cover our own offspring; in their turns
They, too, must cover theirs.

The thought of Blair, though infinitely less well expressed, is plainly that of the young Bryant, who was doubtless familiar with the then popular poem of the older man. Of the lines added later, 1-17 are of the nature of an introduction, 66-72 are so closely related to the thought of the poem that they became really a part of it, and 73-81 are appended to attach a moral thought to the poem. These lines can hardly be called a conclusion, because they do not grow necessarily, or even naturally, out of the thought of the poem proper.

III. Read now the entire poem as it stands at present, consulting the following outline:--

1. Introduction: Nature comforts man when the thought of death makes him gloomy, telling him that:

2. it is true his body will return to earth;

3. yet he will thus become one of the company that includes all the great, the beautiful, the good of the

past;

4. the beauties of Nature are decorations for the tomb of

man;

5. the dead are everywhere, and all who are to come will ultimately join their number.

6. Moral thought: So live that you will not be afraid to die. Consider the thought of the poem carefully. This is sometimes called a "pagan poem." See Hill's Bryant, 214, 215; and Richardson's History of American Literature, II, 37. Does Bryant say any more in this poem than a pagan philosopher could have said?

IV. The thought of the poem is serious and majestic. The style should then be dignified and stately. Show how the style becomes the thought in the following particulars:

1. Diction: length of words; use of specific words; use of

words from the poetic vocabulary (archaic words, epithets, poetic compounds); words not adjectives used for descriptive power.

2. Sentences: length; inversion and suspension; use of series; periodic structure.

3. Figures: apostrophe; personification; simile; metaphor. 4. Meter: blank verse; foot; length of line and placing of pauses.

5. Melody and harmony: alliteration; assonance; dignity of movement; sonorous quality of words used.

Even if you do not consider the subject a profitable one for meditation, you cannot but be impressed with the sublime manner in which Bryant discusses it. His fine poetry awakes the imagination, brings to the mind magnificent pictures, and makes the subject almost attractive.

V. It is interesting to compare the present form of the poem with its first form. Has the poet improved the following early lines?

Line 40. The venerable woods- the floods that move
In majesty - and the complaining brooks,

That wind among the meads and make them green,
Are but the solemn decorations all

Line 47. Are glowing on the sad abodes of death.

Line 50.

Of morning

Take the wings

and the Barcan desert pierce Or lose thyself in the continuous woods

That veil Oregon, where he hears no sound