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Updated: June 15, 2025
"Will you ever forget, Sharlee, the first time you read the other Thanatopsis the one by William Cullen Bryant? Don't you remember how it looked with the picture of Bryant in the old Fifth Reader?" Mr. Miller proved that he could turn brick-red, but he learned nothing from experience. In time, the talk between the two young men, which had begun so desultorily, warmed up.
Can you say how these things fed the imagination of the boy, who had few books and no contact with the great world? Do you think any city lad could have written "Thanatopsis" at eighteen?
She recalled tenderly the young awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little brown cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had compassion for their assertion of culture, even as expressed in Thanatopsis papers, for their pretense of greatness, even as trumpeted in "boosting."
For he was the first of our poets, whose "Thanatopsis" was the hymn of his meditations among the primeval forests of his native hills, and who, in his last years, sat at the door of his early home and looked across the valley of the Westfield to the little town of Plainfield upon the wooded heights beyond, whose chief distinction is that there he wrote the "Waterfowl"; for this graver figure was the poet Bryant.
He wished to continue his education at Yale, but his father had no money for this greater venture, and the son remained at home. There, in the autumn of 1811, on the bleak hills, he composed the first draft of "Thanatopsis." He was seventeen, and he had been reading Blair's "Grave" and the poems of the consumptive Henry Kirke White.
Thea had spent hours making trees out of "Thanatopsis," Hamlet's soliloquy, Cato on "Immortality." She agonized under this waste of time, and was only too glad to accept her father's offer of liberty. So Thea left school the first of November. By the first of January she had eight one-hour pupils and ten half-hour pupils, and there would be more in the summer. She spent her earnings generously.
There was the primer, and there were a few of the old Webster spelling-books, but, while the stories of the boy in the apple tree and the overweening milkmaid were familiar, the popular spelling-book was Town's, and the readers were First, Second, Third and Fourth, and their "pieces" included such classics as "Webster's Reply to Hayne" and "Thanatopsis," and numerous clever exploits of S. P. Willis in blank verse.
She had often glanced at the store-building which had been turned into a refuge in which farmwives could wait while their husbands transacted business. She had heard Vida Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue of the Thanatopsis in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the city council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never entered it till this March day.
This should be practised in connection with the interpretation of melodious, flowing passages, which will furnish opportunity for the appreciation of the relation between the accented and unaccented syllables and the important and unimportant words. Such material as Bryant's "Thanatopsis" is good. Fourth, Phrasing.
What that something should be varied from day to day according to the book, the poem, the history or biography that he was last reading. It would not be difficult to write a poem like "Thanatopsis" if he took time enough, building up a line a day. And yet it would be better to be a soldier, a man who could use the sword as well as the pen, a poet in uniform. This was a pleasing imagination.
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