The poem is a meditation on the universal and inevitable nature of death. It describes how all living things, from the smallest creatures to kings and patriarchs, will eventually pass away and return to the earth. It encourages the reader to face their own mortality with calmness and trust, rather than fear, by contemplating our shared fate and the eternal, natural cycles of life.

1. Thanatopsis
by
William Cullen Bryant

2. To Him who in the love
of Nature holds

3. Communion with Her visible forms

4. She speaks a various language,

5. For his gayer hours she has a voice of
gladness,

6. And a smile and eloquence of beauty,

7. And she glides into his darker

8. With a mile and healing sympathy, ere He is
aware

9. When thoughts of the last bitter hour come like a blight over thy

10. And sad images of the stern agony, and
shroud, and pall,

11. And breathless
darkness, and the
narrow house,
Make the to
shudder, and grow
sick at heart,

12. Go forth under the open

13. And list to Nature’s teachings

14. While from all around, Earth and Her

15. Yet a few days, and thee

16. The all beholding sun shall see no mor
In all his course,

17. Nor yet in the cold ground, where
thy pale form was laid, with many

18. Nor in the embrace of the
ocean, Shall exist Thy image,

19. Earth that nourished Thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth
again,

20. And lost each human
trace, Surrendering up thine
individual being,
oult thou go to mix forever with the elemen

21. To be a brother
to the insensible
rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
turns with his share, And treads upon.

22. The oak shall send his
roots abroad, and
pierce thy mold.

23. Yet not to thine eternal resting place
shalt thou retire alone,

24. Nor couldst thou wish couch more magnif

25. Thou shalt lie down with partriarchs of the
infant world,

26. With Kings, the powerful of the Earth—the Wise, the Go
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,

27. All in one mighty
sepulchre.

28. The hills, rock ribbed and ancient as the sun
The vales stretching in pensive quietness between;

29. The venerable woods, and rivers that move in majest
The

30. The complaining brooks, That make the
meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,

31. Are but all the solemn decorations
Of the great tomb of man,

32. The golden sun, the
planets, All the infinite

33. Are shining on the sad abodes of death
Through the still lapse of ages.

34. All that tread the globe are but a
handful to the tribes

35. Take the wings of
morning, Pierce the Barcan
wilderness,

36. 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
Shall come and make their bed with thee.

37. As the long train of ages glides away, The sons of men,
The youth in life’s green spring,
And he goes in the full strength of years,
matron and maid,

38. Shall one by one be gathered to thy
side,

39. So live that when thy summons comes
to join

40. That innumerable caravan which

41. To that mysterious realm

42. Where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of Death,

43. u go not like a quarry slave at night, scourged to his dunge

44. But, sustained and
soothed,
By an unfaltering trust,

45. Approach Thy grave,

46. ike one who wraps the drapery
Of his couch about him,

47. And lies down to
pleasant dreams.