Thanatopsis

The poem explores what it means to be mortal and thus fated to die, urging readers to dwell on their future absence from the world: One day, “thee / The all-beholding sun shall see no more” (Lines 18-19). The poem dwells on the physical nature of death, chronicling the loss of “each human trace” and “Thine individual being” as your interred body becomes one “with the elements, / To be brother to the insensible rock” (Lines 25-28). These lines paint a vivid image of future lifelessness—bodies after death are so inanimate that they might as well be stones in the ground. Being mortal means eventually losing one’s coherence as an individual and distinguishable being—death will break bodies down into their constituent “elements” instead.

The poem portrays this reality as an inescapable fate. Playing on the Puritan concept of predestination—the belief that souls have a pre-determined afterlife destination at birth—the poem instead posits that only death is predestined for everyone. For instance, it states, “All that breathe / Will share thy destiny” (Lines 61-62). However, for the speaker, rather than evoking the terror of errant behavior that Puritan predestination was meant to elicit, the knowledge that all are fated to die is comforting.