The motif of death in the poetry of walt witman assignment

In My life had stood -a Loaded Gun-, the existence of death allows the existence of life. In Some – Work for Immortality, death is the moment where the speaker can exchange their good behavior for their eternal rewards. Despite of how it might be, all of these several types Of death do not contradict each other. For the author, death is the ultimate unknowable, and so she moves around it, as a way to come as close as she can for knowing the best she can. We are going to analyses two poems of Dickinson in which we found evidences of the importance that she gave to the theme of death in her poetry.

The first poem I chose is Behind Me dips -Eternity. The first thing we can say about this poem is that it has eight syllables verses with a consonant rime. The first three lines of this poem establish the image of Dickinson speaker positioning in the space between he eternity, which goes before her, and the immortality which will follow her, introducing a short interlude. Behind me-dips Eternity- Before me- Immortality- Myself- the term beјen- Death but the drift Of Eastern Gray, Dissolving into dawn away, Before the West begin.

This shows how complex life and death are joined, and how life cannot exist without death, for while the gun may longer live than the human aster, it never really lives at all Without – the power to die The last stanza puts everything together very close, and the evidence for that is the repetition of some words, a resource very used by the author in her whole poetry, but with different purposes in each poem.

Though I than He- may longer live He longer must- than l- For I have but the power to kill, Without- the power to die- In comparison with death as Dickinson sees it, now I am going to talk about how another author, Walt Whitman pictures this same issue. Whitman, just as Dickinson, had to face death since he was very young. He entered the army ruing the Civil War as a volunteered nurse in the hospitals of the army. His health began to deteriorate early in his life, and around 1870 his condition started to get worse faster, till his death in 1891.

The poet’s eventual inability to lament and the evocative images of anonymous death soldiers on the battlefields suggest that something bad is appending. In the first stanzas, the language is formal and sometimes even recharging, full of rhetorical devices. By the end, much of these archaic terms were stripped away; the poet offers only lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of soul. Eventually he simply leaves behind the leaf of lilac, and cease from song, still not sure of just how to lament properly.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’s And the great star early drop’s in the western sky in the night, mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and dropping star in the west, And thought of him love. Whitman realization of immortality, just like Dickinson, through the emotional conflict of personal loss, is the principal theme of this poem, which is a symbolist determination of the poet’s grief and his ultimate reconciliation with life and death.