eBook Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant ePub

We purchased this book for the kids who are descendants of this Bryant line. They are very excited about learning more about their heritage. The personal marks included in this photocopied version of William Cullen Bryant's works only add to the experience and do not detract from the book.

Excellent choice. Good source material.

A transcendental interpretation of Bryant’s Thanatopsis
(original version at the bottom)

Here in the graveyard, I commune with you, newly dead,
With the sun shining through the trees.
Life that escaped.

Your open grave is now bright, now a dark stage of fleeting shadows,
nervous as the crowd of mourners once gathered about the deathbed.
Now gay and healing, too soon dark and silent.

Nearby a sundial marks the hour as all hours are marked
up to the last final one for you to see.

Parted. Final. As when they shovel in the dirt to swallow you up and finish the tale,
and leave you among dead kings and infants, all sobbing and crying with a faint echo.

They have been waiting for you. A multitude. Now you will join them.

Here above is a green meadow at the edge of which are rocks scattered
and the earth that will cover your casket. Beyond that the dark woods,
where the dead peer out. Perhaps we are among them.

I drop a rose upon your casket.

Roger Clough
https://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough

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Thanatopsis

By William Cullen Bryant

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. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice—
Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.
Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings,
The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods—rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,—
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,
The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man—
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those, who in their turn shall follow them.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

--
https://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough

This is a classic D. Appleton and Company release of William Cullen Bryant's poems. If you have visited Bond Street in New York City and passed by this formidable publishing house, you will instantly be reminded of an 18th Century necessity of understanding paths. It is very difficult to find original NYC cobblestone streets in NYC. Bryant definitely matched his publisher from the 1800s and his poems are inclusive of the awe to awkening of what is complacently beguiling about a wildnerness that is the US. The methaphors of forests and woods in his poems are truly "olde" English and the tragedy of the lost person and the reader who has not become lost is still omniscent in Bryant's voice. One of his most promissing texts for the 19th century to current is "Receive Thy Sight," not overtly religious, but difficult in Bryant's ability to translate Christ's observance and pervasive registration.