Outline for “Facing Death”

Outline for “Facing Death”

Topic sentence:

William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman are romantic poets who portrayed in a personal way the concern of other people for life and death.

Introduction

• Death was an ambiguous concept during the Romantic Period, for it could be feared or considered the only escape for the embodiment of the soul.
• William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman are two poets who resembled their personal worries through their works.
• Each of them described the process of life and their own reactions towards maturity and death.
• This essay will compare and contrast some fragments from Wordsworth poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” and Whitman’s Song of Myself to clarify the ambiguity of Death, and the respective solutions given to the same matter.

Analysis

Wordsworth

• The form of the poem (different length for each verse) shows the variability of tone in the thoughts that he went through since he was a child to his maturity.
• The voice of a child is used to express mature thoughts.
• The constant worry for loss and death leads to hope for immortality.
• There must be harmony between creatures. Life must be lived with joy, for death will take it away.

Whitman

• Song of Myself  echoes epic, but the introductory “I” makes it more a lyrical and personal poem.
• Irregularity of the verses that give the poem its quality of “song”.
• Repetitive devices that enhance some ideas of the poet (alliteration, syntactic parallelism, anaphora).
• The parallelism that appears since the beginning of the poem enhances the idea of unity with other creatures in the world (quote first verse paragraph from I of Song of Myself.)

Sensorial world

• In Wordsworth poem, the sensorial world is more a prison than a shelter for souls (quote stanza X).
• Whitman’s idea of the body that will eventually die only to form part of other organic creatures.
• He emphasizes the idea of life and death being part of the same cycle.

God

• For both, Wordsworth and Whitman, God represents the purest beginning of life for any soul (quote stanza V from Wordsworth’s poem and the middle part of I from Whitman’s)

Conclusion

• Humans can overcome fear for death by accepting it as part of a whole cycle.

Ix Ikoki Armenta Alquicira

Bibliography

- GILL, Stephen, The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

- KILLINGSWORTH, M. Jimmie, The Cambridge Companion to Whitman. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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