Analysis Of The Pit And The Pendulum, And Thanatopsis

Romanticism: Literary Analysis of The Devil and Tom Walker,

The Pit and the Pendulum, and Thanatopsis When someone hears the word romantic they think of love, or Valentine’s Day and couples. Romanticism is actually when the value of feeling and intuition is greater than the value of reason, which became very popular in the 1800’s. Several American literature selections from this period are considered romantic, some with the recurring theme of darkness and death, and three of which include: Washington Irving’s The Devil and Tom Walker, William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis, and The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe. In Washington Irving’s The Devil and Tom Walker, Tom is a greedy man who does not care much for his wife; he just cares

Thanatopsis is translated in Greek to “a meditation in death.” In reality, people get sickened by the idea of death coming upon them one day, such as the man in the poem. The problem is, everyone will die someday and everyone needs to come to terms with this fact. Throughout the poem, a personified Nature speaks to him. She tells him that she can rid him of sadness and tries to persuade him to rest, because someday everyone will rest; “So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw / In silence from the living, and no friend / Take note of thy departure?” Nature is trying to convince him to “rest” to rid himself of his sorrows and she tells him that his friends won’t be bothered by his passing on. She is trying to help him accept the fact that he must one day die and move on from this life. The speaker proclaims at the end of the poem that “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.” When it is all said and done, through the fear, Nature lets him go in peace, and he does not restrain. He has accepted it. Bryant uses his imagination to give a lesson of reality to the world; everyone will die. He uses nature - personified and physically - to display this lesson throughout

This story is about a prisoner in Toledo, Spain during the Spanish Inquisition, and is from the viewpoint of the prisoner himself, trying to recall his traumatic experience. The prisoner hears that he is sentenced to death, which he doesn’t understand. While half-unconscious, he feels himself being carried down to what seems to be an abyss. When he wakes, he finds himself to be strapped to a table in a pitch black room, with a sharp, swinging pendulum above him. This was his sentence; a torturous death. He felt as if agonizing days were passing while awaiting his death. He managed to escape before he was sliced open by the pendulum, only to be forced towards a dark, deadly pit in the center of the room by the moving walls. Suddenly, when he was about to fall into this deadly pit, he was saved by the leader of the French army, General Lasalle, during his invasion of Spain. This prisoner was willing to chance getting hurt trying to escape the brutal Spanish Inquisition, than just go to death with open arms. He did not think rationally about his actions, he just acted. The idea of death almost sent him over the edge; pun