Thanatopsis Death Quotes

This is one of the first mentions of death in the poem, and it’s pretty spooky.  We start out thinking about the heavy, sad, scary side of death.  This is the stuff you might worry about while you’re lying in bed late at night.  You might start to think about being in the grave, in the dark, unable to breathe, boxed in by a "narrow" coffin.  Well, we hope you don’t think about that stuff much.  In case we do get a little depressed about death, the speaker wants us to know that we can feel better just by going outside.

This is kind of a weird moment in the poem.  Basically, it tells us that we’re about to die.  We think this is a way of getting the reader to think a little more about this scary subject.  We spend a lot of time trying not to think about death, so the speaker asks us to put ourselves in this situation, to imagine that we are facing death in "just a few days."

This is a big theme in this poem.  When we die, the speaker says, we’ll go back into the soil, return to the earth that fed us as we grew.  This is where the nature and death themes come together, where we see the link between the end of our lives and the entire universe.  It’s not a new idea at all. Maybe you’ve heard the saying "ashes to ashes, dust to dust"  - same idea.  It sounds a little grim, but we don’t think it’s meant that way.  This poem really wants to focus us on big cycles, on the harmony between us and the world.  That’s what this line is all about.

If there’s one take-away idea from this poem, one central image, we think this is probably it.  The earth is full of dead people, tons and tons and tons of them.  Even when we die, we aren’t really alone, because we’ve got all those other dead folks to keep us company.  This might seem like a pretty simple idea, but this poem works really hard to make sure we think about it.  The speaker repeats this same point in a bunch of different ways, giving us a whole string of different images to help make it clear. 

Here’s another way of saying "the earth is full of dead people."  Actually, that would be a really good subtitle for this poem: "Thanatopsis, or, the Earth is Full of Dead People" by William Cullen Bryant.  OK, maybe it doesn’t have the same ring.  Still, that’s the whole point.  People have been dying since the beginning of time, and there are millions (that’s right, millions) of them in the ground already.  So, no need to be lonely when you die.  Feel better?