reflection 16

For this blog I have chosen the poem To a Waterfowl by William Cullen Bryany, yes the same guy who did Thanatopsis. I am not entirely sure what you meant by the meaning of the poem, so I am going to break this poem down paragraph by paragraph.

Whither, 'midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way? (Bryant)

Someone is dying, and they will soon be in heaven.

Vainly the fowler's eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.(Bryant)

The hunter's eye is failing him. A figure floats into the distant crimson sky, or that dying guy is in the process of dying.

Seek'st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean side?(Bryant)

This dying person seeks the wonders of heaven, consisting of rivers, lakes, and oceans apparently.

There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,--
The desert and illimitable air,--
Lone wandering, but not lost.(Bryant)

A power, whom I believe is supposed to be god, is guiding this dying fellow on his way to heaven.

All day thy wings have fann'd
At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere:
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.(Bryant)

The dying fellow has been traveling all day (as in he has been on his death bed and traversing the path to heaven). He has been welcomed in to the cold atmosphere (heaven is usually considered to be up so his soul is presumably going up through the atmosphere which is cold, or cold refers to him dying as the body becomes cold when you die. Either one.) His time has nearly come. I do not want to make this whole thing just quoting the poem then putting it in simple terms, as well as I have other points to make along with that, so I will stop there and move on. From what you can see this poem is about the wonders of death and the marvels of heaven, along with the plights of getting there. God teaches those going to heaven how to get there and so on. Very religious. This is definitely a fireside poem as there is a great deal of descriptive nature involved. Bryant basically describes heaven as being close to a nature based paradise filled with rivers, oceans, and lakes, with a crimson sky. This is odd as most interpretations of heaven involve clouds, but this is more about water and the sky. Thats my take on it anyway. According to this criticism by Miller I am half right on my point about this being about death. "According to him this poem is about how the speaker is comparing how god guides us through life to death just as a bird (a waterfowl to be more specific) is guided in it's migration by an unknown instinct." (Miller). I was close, as I picked up on the death thing, but I believed that someone was dying and the speaker was writing about that, but that is apparently not the case. But this is an opinion kind of thing and I like mine, as I did not see a single reference to the bird apart from the title and fowler, which is a hunter of birds, which not enough to make that connection apparently.

"To a Waterfowl." Virginia Commonwealth University. Web. 07 Dec. 2011.

Miller, Matt. "'To a Waterfowl'." In Barney, Brett, and Lisa Paddock, eds. Encyclopedia of American Literature: The Age of Romanticism and Realism, 1816–1895, vol. 2, Revised Edition. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2008. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.