Reflection: Thanatopsis

William Cullen Bryant's poem is a prime example of the types of work and poems that were written in the romanticism time period. One of the commen characteristics of the Romanticism period is the writing about nature. Everything has to do with nature. This poem is about how death and nature are related. Death comes from nature and we all die and go right back to nature. FOr instance, a lot of people are buried in the ground and then become one with nature when they are buried. This whole poem used very descriptive words about nature and revolves the whole subject around nature. To Nature's teachings, while from all around Earth and her waters, and the depths of air
Comes a still voice—Yet a few days, and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more(Bryant 13). It talks about nature teaching you with her waters, the air, and all the other aspects of nature until the final days when the sun no longer shines any more. I think William Cullen Bryant had a point he was trying to get to his readers. I think he wrote this poem as a way to make his readers feel better about death. He wanted them to feel it was a natural thing, and not to be so afraid of it because it is inevitable. This poem's subject was a little sad, with it being all about death, but I do admire his point, because whether we like it or not, death is going to happen to us, and every single one of the people we love. NO, it sometimes will not feel fair, especially the timing if they go too soon, but it happens. We all will have to return to "nature". This is very different that what a puritan writing would of looked like. If a puritan writer would of been writing about the same thing, we would not be returning to nature, we would be returning to god. It is very interesting to look at all the time periods and see how the writers behaved. I think honestly I would agree more with the Puritan writers returning to god than the romanticism and returning to nature.


Bryant's last paragraph is very interesting, but it has a more dark tone than the rest of the poem. So live, that when thy summons comes to joinThe 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 couchAbout him, and lies down to pleasant dreams(Bryant 70-80). It incorporates the myteriousness and darkness that death has, but it also reminds you and the very end...that you are at peace. You are one with nature, and you can lie down to pleasant dreams. The last paragraph i think was a little more rational than the rest of the poem, because he is also talking about the darkness of the subject death, not just acting like it is all okay and we are just about nature and it is happy. The poet realizes that death is a dark thing, but it is also a very peaceful thing.

Byant, William C. "Thanatopsis." PoemHunter.com. 13 May 2001. Web. 22 Nov. 2011. .r

Reflection-Romantacism/ Fireside poets

The fireside poets were also known as household poets or school room poets. They were basically the first group of American poets that rivaled British poets in popularity. They were poets during the romanticism period. Their poems do not seem really romantic to me, but they are very descriptive. I found one poem that was full of descriptive words by John Greenleaf Whittier. This is an excerpt from Snow-Bound
"We watched the first red blaze appear,
Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam
On whitewashed wall and sagging beam,
Until the old, rude-furnished room
Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;
While radiant with a mimic flame
Outside the sparkling drift became,
And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree
Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free."(A Brief Guide).
They use so many descriptive words that the writers of the Rationalism period did not use. They were very different writers. The rationalism writers used reason and and facts and did not really use anything that had to do with emotion. They did not want to appeal to your emotion. I think Romanticism is very different because they use all kinds of descriptive words that completely appeal to your senses and emotions. Romanticism was a reaction do Rationalism. They had much more of a value for feeling and emotion over the reason. They started writing poetry which was like an art instead of facts and figures and examples and reason that the writers of the rational period used. It was much more imaginative compared to rationalism which was much much more scientific. They do not really like civilization it seems. The romanticism writers seem much more like they like freedom and just going with the flow and nature and all the lovely things that they wrote poetry about. They did not seem to be so fond of the facts and reason that the rationalism writers just loved so much. They linked nature together with spirituality as where in the puritan writing period that was prior to the Romanticism period where God was not linked with anything he was the only thing that even mattered. Romanticism writers found beauty in pretty much everything. Even fire was beautiful to them, but in the rationalism period it seemed that they found fault in pretty much everything instead of beauty. The common themes of Romanticism love, nature, patriotism, family, god, and religion. In rationalism there was not really any common themes. The were just using reason to argue all the thing they talked about, and even prior to the rationalism period during the puritan period the ONLY theme they wrote about basically was God. Writing has changed a lot between the three periods. Mostly just between Rationalism and Romanticism. Some Romanticism writers were much more dark. They used the romanticism writing style with all the description to describe much more odd things. One writer who's work we have read through out the years in school, was Edger Allen Poe who wrote about fears and physcological things like death and others. I like rationalism period much more than the romanticism period because the way my brain works is with reason and much less with emotion. My brain just works so much better that way.

"A Brief Guide to the Fireside Poets." Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More. Web. 22 Nov. 2011.

Journal #19

Spirituality has a lot to do with the circle of life and death. I know that we are not really supposed to discuss religion and god at school. Religion is very important to the circle of life because I believe that it dictates where you go in death after life. If you are religious and you believe in God and live you part of the circle of life for god then I believe that in death you will go to heaven and be with God during death. If you do not believe in god and live your life in a horrible way then you probably will not go to heaven you will go to hell because you are a bad person. I know that this may sound hypocritical and all talking about where you go because I just like everyone else am a sinner. But I do totally one hundred percent believe in God. I obviously hope that after life I go to heaven and not hell. Nature does not have to do as much with the circle of life and death, but I can see it going with it a little bit. Maybe if you are on earth during life you should become one with the earth and then you could maybe become more spiritual. A lot of philosophies and people believe that spirituality and nature go together hand in hand. I however do not I do not really think the ground and plants and things like that have to do with God and how he is our holy savior. I do not really see the link between the two, but I know that some people think that. Life and death is actually a scary thing because you never know the times frames of either one of them. you just have to live every single day like it could be your last one on the first part of the circle of life and death.

Journal #18

Fall is an extremely beautiful and lovely time of the year. Autumn is full of colorful leaves. There are orange, yellow, and red. Sometimes there is even green left over from the summer time. During Fall there is crisp air and breezes that are sometimes too much coldness for little ol me to handle. There are many activities that people should do during fall. One is bonfires. Bonfires are very fall. The only bad thing about bonfires is the smell of the smoke fills your hair and hoodie and it is a very strong scent that is a little difficult to get out. Autumn is all about football games. It is all about the boys of fall. If only we went to a school where the boys of fall were good and we went far into the season later into fall. Fall fashion is the absolute best. I love my boots and I love my mocassins and I love my hoodies. In fall my birthday comes! I get all kinds of fun presents from all the people that I love and adore so dearly. Homecoming also comes during fall. I love homecoming. It is an excuse so spend money on pretty dresses and manis and pedis and shoes and jewelry to go out to dinner and have fun with all of your friends. Then you get to go take pictures with all of your best friends and go dance the night away. Fall is just filled with a million fun things. It is the perfect time of year. It is easily my favorite season of the year. The weather is that perfect balance of cold but crisp but still warm if that makes any sense at all. I wish the weather was like the first week of fall year round. Except I wish we did not have school during the fall because school is very boring. I love fall a lot, and i am pretty sure every single person does.

Journal #17

There were many times that I have bonded with nature. A few years back my friends, Ainsley, Melissa, and I would go out on the warm summer nights and we would lay out on the driveway and we would stargaze. For hours and hours we would just lay in the driveway at one of our three houses and we would just lay there and stare up at the stars. I felt as if I was one with the stars and the sky. It was very very relaxing and time seemed to fly by. Other times I felt I was bonding with nature was times when my mother and I would spend hours and hours on end planting all kinds of plants in the spring to make her garden look nice. Every year pretty much we would do this because when my mom was a kid she would do these things with her grandma. She really cared about her garden and how it looked. We would go out and we would buy all kinds of flowers, shrubs, and other kinds of plants. We would then go home and we would plant all the things we had bought. This would seriously take hours. All day, but we would get a tan by staying out all day and planting so that was always a plus. Nature is very nice. Nature is a wide a ray of things. I also remember when I was little I would set my alarm to the nature sounds when I fell asleep. I would stay awake and just relax and listen to the nature sounds. That was a way to bond with nature because every night when I fell asleep I would just lay there and listen to nature sounds as I was falling asleep. Nature is a beautiful peaceful and relaxing things. I think now i want to bring back my nature alarm clock and as I fall asleep I can do that.

Journal #16

There are many tools that as a student and part of a group can use in order to communicate with my partners in the Franklin Virtues Project partners. One tool that we can use and already have used is skyping. We skyped with the seniors who have previously done the project from Farmington. We got to talk to them to get information about the project, and get information about Farmington and what they do there and the similarities and differences to Plains. We found out that they are actually very similar to Plains. They are pretty much living in the middle of a cornfield too. They said they do not do anything really in the actual town but go to athletic games and stuff like that. It was very similar to to Plains. They are pretty much as close to Peoria as Plains is to Springfield. There are also many other tools that we can use to communicate. Email is another one. We can email them to get information about how they are doing on their projects and to transport our finished things for the project. For the people that are in my group that go to plains I can pretty much use any form of communication. Two of the people in my group are two of my good friends so it will be very easy to communicate with them because I can text them, talk to them in real life, or use all the digital communication that I have to use with the kids from Farmington. It is going to be good for us to learn to communicate completely digitally will other students because in college we pay have to do that or when we work in the workforce when we are older a lot of jobs require you to email your co workers and get information on the project at hand. This project is a good preperation in the future for us in college or in the work force.

Journal #16

It is very difficult for me to work with people probably because I am a control freak. It is very hard with me to share responsibility with other people because I am scared that they will do it wrong and I want it to be done my way. It will be even more difficult to do a group project with people that I am not even with in person. It will be difficult to get a lot of stuff, a big project with people that are not even in our school. I will have to be very patient and try to let go of my control freak ways and let people do other stuff. Hopefully the other people in my group are smart and at least have a good work ethic so that the project will get done and I will not end up doing the whole thing. I really wish we were not doing this project because I do not like group projects. Pretty much every other group project I have done I have ended up doing the whole entire thing. It is just not fun. I will have to have good communication skills with everyone in my group in order for this to work. Luckily, two of the other four people in my group are my friends. They are not in my English class because they are in regular english, but they are both people that I talk to. That will make the project a little bit easier. If I can depend on those two to get stuff done hopefully the other two in Farmington are just as hard working and they do some stuff for our project. I hope this project works out and we all get good grades on it. I will probably end up doing a lot but that is okay because I really care about my grades and I both want and need to get a good grade on this project.

Reflection- Franklin and tuckerman

Ben Franklin had many virtues that he wrote in his life. Ben Franklin wrote a list of virtues that he thought people could use in their everyday life to help them get things done in a rational way. the first thing Ben Franklin did when he wrote or made the list of virtues was to incorporate them into his everyday life and make sure that they were virtues that were correct and practical. He wanted to make sure they worked for himself before he shared them with other people and they were not good. I think ben Franklin was a very intelligent man and the virtues he came up with were smart and people could really use them. Franklin made a good observation and a ratinal one at that by realizing that you could not change your whole life all at once. You needed to master the virtues one at a time. He knew it would take time to get them all mastered. H started to conform his virtues to a new list he had came up with. By reading the literary criticism by Tuckerman I felt that Tuckerman liked Ben Franklin. In his criticism he was pretty nice to Franklin. I noticed that Tuckerman said that Ben Franklin was both "practical and he has prominent characteristics" (Tuckerman). That sounds like a pretty good compliment to me. Tuckerman's criticism is a good one because ther was support from Franklin's autobiography that supports the opinions that Tuckerman stated and I agree with most of those opinions. In Franklin's autobiography he seemed to never be hypocritical. I think that Ben Franklin was both very smart like I said before, and I also think that he was a good guy. He did not just preach his virtues out at everyone because he felt like it and felt like telling people what to do. He followed those virtues himself and i think really wanted to change people for the better so that they could be successfull too. He would incorporate these virtues into his life at the rate of one virtue per week (Franklin 150). I think that is pretty cool that Franklin organized his virtues and kept track of them. That showed that he cared about following his virtues in order to be able to rationalize to people and have data and proof that they worked. That shows that he is a rationalist. It showed that he had thought about how he should approach this and he had a method to all of these virtues that could be seen as random to somebody else. Franklin said, "And, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate thea cquisition of certain others, I arranged them with that view, as they stand above."(Franklin 150). This was him showing that he had some order to all of his ideas and being able to rationalize it to the others. I do not know how he organized his virtues but I think that he organized them in a way of difficulty and importrance. If you had trouble with the prior virtues you would probably really struggle with newer ones.

Franklin, Benjamin, and Leonard Woods Labaree. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New Haven: Yale UP, 1964. Print.

Tuckerman, Henry T. "The Character of Franklin." Facts on File. Web. 30 Oct. 2011.

Reflection- Philosophies of deism

Ben Franklin is known as kind of the enterpenuer of his day. He pretty much did everything. He was anything from a philopoher to an inventor, and it seems as though he succeeded in just about everything that he did. He was a very intelligent man and activily agreed with rationalism and Deism. He had thirteen virtues that he is known for. Virtues are very similair to morals. Ben Franklin's virtues were not only very wise but he was rational in the way he went about them.

He had two sets of his virtues. The first set was personal. The personal virtues are the morals or virtues that are about your attitude, activities, and the challenges that you face within your personal situations. If you have a good character you are probably going to go farther in life, or at least achieve your personal goals, or at least reach your goals in a way that you are morally okay with. The first personal virtues were temperance and order. Temperance is rational because if you do things rationally you do them in moderation, you do not just blow things up, because it can be overwhelming. The order aspect of personal virtues is rational because it is organizing and if you are a rationalist you must prove your points. The next few virtues of Franklin were resolution and frugality. Rationalists wanted a a resolution to things(Franklin). Moderation and industry were also a part of Franlin's virtues. Moderation is similair to temperance. But industry is rational becausy you are always supposed to be working and getting things done. Most rationalists probably use the industry virtue and have a good work ethic because they know it is rational to have a good work ethic in order to get things done. Rationalist are always busy(Franklin). the last two personal virtues were cleanliness and tranquility. Cleanliness is not really a rational virtue just something that i agree everyone should follow. Even though a lot of people do not... Ben Franklin's personal virtues showed how he incorporated his life and actual virtues into rationalism(Bloom).

Along with personal virtues, Franklin also had social virtues. These included things like silence, sincerity, justice, chasity, and humility. The silence aspect is rational because you can not speak bad things about other people because of karma. It will come back around and get you. With sincerity, you just need to be sincere because it is the right thing to do and you must be sincere and understanding in situations. Justice is showing that rationalists wanted peace and they just want to do what is right and have to do what needs to be done for something to get accomplished(Franklin). Chasity is not really related to rationalism, but I am sure that Franklin was thinking of something rational when he wrote his virtues. The final social virtue is humility and it says to imitate Jesus(Bloom). Rationalists did what was needed, they did not always rely on other or god to get them where they need to be, they did that themselves. The social virtues especially written by Franklin pertained to rationalism.

Bloom, Harold, ed. "Benjamin Franklin." Benjamin Franklin, Classical Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2008. Bloom's Literary referance Onlin. Facts on File, Inc.

Boucquey, Thierry, gen. ed. "Franklin, Benjamin." Encyclopedia of World Writers, 14th through 18th Centuries. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2005. Bloom's Literary Reference Onlin. Facts on File, Inc.