Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American poets mourning the loss of loved ones or national figures often focused on the pious and virtuous lives of the deceased. These years saw the continued growth of nationalism as well as individualism. Phillis Wheatley’s (c. 1753–1784) “On the Death of the Rev. MR. GEORGE WHITEFIELD” (1770) adapts several techniques common in colonial elegies. Puritans viewed colonizing America as God’s will, and Sacvan Bercovitch writes that colonial elegies “[use] the saint’s glorification to project the country’s coming glory [… and…] translate private loss into an affirmation not (primarily) of immortality but of political continuity” (1975, p. 120). Wheatley’s poem notes that the deceased will “[leave] the earth for heav’n’s unmeasur’d height” (line 12), a journey described to evoke the voyage to America: “[Whitefield] sails to Zion through vast seas of day” (line 15).3 The image suggests that salvation in Heaven and life in America are both God’s gifts to the faithful, fitting given Whitefield’s dual religious-patriotic work: “He pray’d that grace in ev’ry heart might dwell,/He long’d to see America excel[…]” (lines 20–21). Read in the context of Wheatley’s overall support for emancipation and the American Revolution,4 Wheatley’s elegy for Whitefield suggests that supporting the cause of increased political freedom was a divine mission and such a death was especially deserving of salvation.
In the nineteenth century, especially in the 1850s and 1860s, much American poetry was shaped by a sentimental tradition exemplified by the “Sweet Singer of Hartford,” Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865). Her poems are characterized by themes of traditional domesticity, conventional religious tropes, and diction that is often bathetic. “Death of an Infant” (1827) illuminates the power of the promise of an eternal home in Heaven to subdue grief—in Sigourney’s case, the deeply painful experience of three miscarriages. This poem assures the reader that death cannot steal the life of her dead baby who is bound for Heaven:
[...] But there beam’d a smile
So fix’d and holy from that marble brow, –
Death gazed and left it there; – he dared not steal
The signet-ring of Heaven.
(lines 12–15)
In the nineteenth century, as in Puritan times, people mostly died at home. A body was kept in the home for several days—the “wake”—in part to ensure that the person was truly dead; the funeral also took place at home (National Museum of Funeral History n.d.). Poetry and other writing reflect this familiarity with the dying body. Lewis Saum notes that letters of the time often describe individuals’ deaths in “physiological detail” (1975, pp. 33–34). Observers felt that a “sober, explicit statement of submission to God’s will by the dying” (Saum 1975, p. 43) signified faith. In the best cases their apparent “Happiness and triumph” showed that “death represented escape from the world’s sadness” (Saum 1975, pp. 46–48). Thus, the smile in “Death of an Infant” was understood in the nineteenth century as proof that the child was going to Heaven.
Sigourney was one of many writers of “consolation literature,” which regarded mourning as underscoring the belief that “heaven [is] a continuation and a glorification of the domestic sphere” (Douglas 1975, p. 55). This was part of a shift toward the “emergence of a modern Heaven” as a human society where ideal human relationships flourished (McDannell and Lang 1988, pp. 181–227). Until the funeral industry’s professionalization in the late nineteenth century, loved ones washed and dressed the body for burial, and Farrell reports that this task frequently fell to women (1980, p. 147). Differences in domestic responsibilities including those pertaining to death may help to explain gendered dimensions to mourning in poetry. In recalling differences between Bradstreet and Taylor, we might consider whether female American poets in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries often displayed an increased emphasis on the body and earthly life.
In contrast to the religious trope of salvation by an all-powerful redeemer and the promise of eternal life, “Thanatopsis” (18215) by William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) meditates on death as the conclusion to a finite life that should be lived well. The poem gives no promise of an afterlife, no invocation of a higher power; instead, only nature is eternal and is the universal grave of all living creatures. The speaker suggests finding respite by viewing death as in accordance with the laws of nature: “[…] When thoughts/Of the last bitter hour come like a blight/Over thy spirit […],” he recommends, “Go forth, under the open sky, and list/To Nature’s teachings […]” (p.32). The poem suggests that death is a return to nature:
[…] Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock[.]
(p. 32)
The universal experience of death as a return to the Earth is an egalitarian—democratic—interpretation of death, unlike the Puritan division between the elect and the damned. Farrell suggests that a novel shift toward viewing death as “reunion of the dead with nature” occurred around this time and was reflected in the rural cemetery movement (1980, p. 105). Bryant also suggests that the best way to experience a sense of peace when confronted by death is to have lived well:
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
(p. 34)
The shift toward viewing death as a reunion with nature was also reflected in the rural cemeteries. Mount Auburn—formed in 1831—was pleasant for the living to visit due to its pastoral landscaping. These new burial places were made popular not only by logistical factors like “rapid urban growth and population mobility” that pushed burial to rural areas but also by “revisions of religious doctrines, Romantic affection for Nature” (Farrell 1980, p. 102). Stanley French argues that the “creation of Mount Auburn marked a change in prevailing attitudes about death and burial” (1975, p. 70).
Perhaps no American poet more embodies the struggle between religious faith and profound agnosticism which leads to the rejection of a belief in salvation by a supreme God and an afterlife than Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). Many of Dickinson’s poems and letters chronicle her agonized questioning of death and its aftermath, and after a protracted and arduous struggle with the religious beliefs of her family and community, Dickinson creates her personal poetic ontology in which home is paradise, nature is sacred, and art is eternal.6 Courageously accepting the inevitability of death, Dickinson’s poems celebrate her deepest convictions that, in the context of mortality, we should appreciate the gift of this life. Her poems explore a wide range of emotions