Thanatopsis
[2] 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.
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.
[8] Bryant's inspiration for "Thanatopsis" came after reading William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads,[9] as well as Robert Blair's "The Grave", Beilby Porteus's "Death" and Kirke White's "Time".
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: To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere he is aware.
Thou shalt lie down With 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 hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods—rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,— Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man.
The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come And make their bed with thee.
As the long train Of ages glide away, the sons of men, The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes In 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.
"[15] 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 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.
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 seminal conservationist Aldo Leopold quoted several passages from Thanatopsis in his posthumously published essay "Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest."
