"Thanatopsis" is an early poem by the American poet William Cullen Bryant. Meaning 'a consideration of death', the word is derived from the Greek 'thanatos' (death) and 'opsis' (view, sight).[1]
William Cullen Bryant was born in 1794 in Cummington, Massachusetts. Bryant grew up in a Puritan home with his father, Peter Bryant, a prominent doctor who provided him with much of his early education. In his early life Bryant would spend a great deal of time in the woods surrounding his family's New England home, and read of the extensive personal library his father had. Bryant's first published poem was "The Embargo; or, Sketches of the Times", a satirical work concerning Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807. It was released in a Boston newspaper in 1808. In 1810 Bryant was forced to leave Williams College for lack of money. Instead of a formal education, he started studying law, and began learning an eclectic mix of poetry, such as the works of Isaac Watts and Henry Kirke White, and verses like William Cowper's The Task and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
When and where Bryant wrote "Thanatopsis" is unclear, and Bryant himself could not remember when he wrote the verse. According to Parke Godwin, Bryant's friend, Bryant wrote the poem when he was seventeen years old in mid-1811, just after he had left Williams College.
Bryant reportedly wrote his first draft of "Thanotopsis" in Flora's Glen in Williamstown.[2]
In History of American Literature, two dates are stated for the authoring of "Thanatopsis", 1811 and 1816. Bryant's inspiration for "Thanatopsis" came after reading William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, as well as Robert Blair's "The Grave", Beilby Porteus's "Death" and Kirke White's "Time". After Bryant had left Cummington to begin his law studies, his father discovered a manuscript in Bryant's desk drawer, that contained "Thanatopsis" and a fragment of a poem, which would be published under the title "The Fragment",[3] and later titled "An Inscription upon the Entrance to a Wood". He sent the two poems without his son's knowledge to the editors at the North American Review, where they were published in September 1817.[4] The editors added an introduction to Thanatopsis in a completely different style. The part written by the author begins with "Yet a few days,". The author republished the poem in 1821 in a collection of works called Poems. He replaced the introductory section, made a few minor changes to the text and added more material after the original end of the poem, which was "and make their bed with thee!". Below is the revised version of 1821 which was retained in all later publications of the poem:
Yet not to thine eternal resting-placeShalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wishCouch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie downWith 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 hillsRock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the valesStretching in pensive quietness between;The venerable woods—rivers that moveIn majesty, and the complaining brooksThat make the meadows green; and, poured round all,Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,—Are but the solemn decorations allOf 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 treadThe globe are but a handful to the tribesThat slumber in its bosom.—Take the wingsOf morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,Or lose thyself in the continuous woodsWhere rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there:And millions in those solitudes, since firstThe flight of years began, have laid them downIn their last sleep—the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdrawIn silence from the living, and no friendTake note of thy departure? All that breatheWill share thy destiny. The gay will laughWhen thou art gone, the solemn brood of carePlod on, and each one as before will chaseHis favorite phantom; yet all these shall leaveTheir mirth and their employments, and shall comeAnd make their bed with thee. As the long trainOf ages glide away, the sons of men,The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goesIn 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 joinThe innumerable caravan, which movesTo that mysterious realm, where each shall takeHis chamber in the silent halls of death,Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothedBy an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one who wraps the drapery of his couchAbout him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
Due to the unusual quality of the verse and Bryant's age, Richard Henry Dana Sr., then associate editor at the North American Review, initially doubted its authenticity, saying to another editor, "No one, on this side of the Atlantic, is capable of writing such verses."
"Thanatopsis" remains a milestone in American literary history. Poems was considered by many to be the first major book of American poetry. Nevertheless, over five years, it earned Bryant only $14.92.[5] Poet and literary critic Thomas Holley Chivers, who often accused other writers of stealing poems, said that the only thing Bryant "ever wrote that may be called Poetry is 'Thanatopsis,' which he stole line for line from the Spanish."[6]
In The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, Clarice Starling reveals to Hannibal Lecter one detail of her father's last days in a hospital: an elderly neighbour reading to him the last lines of "Thanatopsis." In Sinclair Lewis' novel Main Street, the women's study club of Gopher Prairie is the Thanatopsis club.
The experimental band Thanatopsis (featuring Buckethead and Travis Dickerson) was named after this poem. The band's first album, Thanatopsis, was also named after this poem. The electronic artist Daedelus named the last song on the album Exquisite Corpse after the poem.
The Avant Garde film-maker Ed Emshwiller's 1962 short film Thanatopsis was inspired by the poem. In the Space Ghost Coast to Coast episode "Terminal," a portion of the poem is set to folk music and sung by writer/producer Dave Willis.
In 1934, Scott Bradley composed an oratorio, based on Thanatopsis.
In the 1942 film Grand Central Murder, the private railway car where the showgirl is murdered is named Thanatopsis.
In 1942, the night before his execution by a Japanese firing squad, United States Army Air Corps pilot William G. Farrow referenced the poem in a letter he wrote to his mother. He had been captured after flying a B-25 Mitchell bomber on the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. He told her, "Read Thanatopsis by Bryant if you want to know how I am taking this. My faith in God is complete, so I am unafraid."
The American author of detective fiction Phoebe Atwood Taylor has her hero Leonidas Witherall recount the first lines in her 1947 book The Iron Clew. The poem is also mentioned in Taylor's 1934 book The Mystery of the Cape Cod Tavern as having been part of an obituary.
The seminal conservationist Aldo Leopold quoted several passages from Thanatopsis in his posthumously published essay "Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest."
In August Wilson's 2003 play Gem of the Ocean, Solly offers the final nine lines of the poem ("So live . . . pleasant dreams") as a toast to send off Citizen Barlow to the city of bones. Eli joins Solly in the recitation, offering his own interpretation of the lines: "You die by how you live."
The Acacia fraternity adopted the last stanza as their code.
Cindy Williams reads from Thanatopsis in Andy Kaufman's ABC TV Special aired in 1979.
In the 2020 film Driveways, Jerry Adler's character quotes the poem as a sudden memory from his childhood; a sign he has dementia.