Nature

“The Day is Done” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1844)

The speaker begs an unnamed companion to share a brief poem about life’s possibilities to console him and quiet his melancholy. This homage to poetry reflects a much younger Longfellow and foreshadows “Nature,” which provides the brief consolation poem his younger self needed.

“Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas (1947)

As a measure of how a 20th-century poet responded to the premise of Longfellow’s gentle and uplifting poem, Dylan Thomas’ landmark poem argues the opposite of Longfellow: Thomas, reflecting the Modernist urgencies and uncertainties over the possibility of a transcendent afterlife, counsels only to fight and resist. Borrowing from Longfellow’s metaphor in “Nature,” this would equate to the boy throwing a temper tantrum that might stall the surrender to sleep.

“Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant (1817)

Bryant, another of the Fireside poets, penned this affirmation on how to die quietly and with dignity as part of his undergraduate curriculum at Williams College. He was 17 at the time. The two poems can be compared as the argument of a young student for whom death is still far off, against the spiritual serenity of a man who has lived well beyond his expectations and is nearing the end of his life.