Compare And Contrast Walt Snowman And Mary Oliver

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American Transcendentalism is common amongst many authors and poets. Authors and poets have used animals and nature to symbolize different things like life, death, and various other topics regarding the human experience. Both Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver were transcendentalists; they strongly followed the rule of self-reliance and found truth in nature. They both use animals and nature in their poems to symbolize life and death but contrast in what life and death means to them in their poems.
Walt Whitman, notorious as the “American Bard”, revolutionized American poetry and improvised the form recognized as free verse. Whitman wrote the poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” which was originally published as, ““A Child’s Reminiscence” …show more content…

Whitman chose a bird and Oliver chose the black snake. In literature, birds are used to represent freedom, something positive, or transition. “They represent the human desire to escape gravity, to reach the level of the angel. The bird is often the disembodied human soul, free of its physical constrictions” (Birds). Whitman uses the bird to represent the transition of the death of the self to the birth of a poet. The boy is free to be a poet, which is what his soul was always destined to be. In literature, snakes are used to represent fertility, a creative life force, rebirth, transformation, immortality, healing, temptation, chaos or something negative. In literature, the color black is used to represent evil, fear, death, or something negative. Oliver used the black snake because most people are scared of snakes; most people wouldn’t care to stop their car to pick up a snake on the road and bring it to safety like they would with deer, cats, or dogs. Oliver wanted the reader to realize that a person should always treat anything and everything with care, love, and compassion no matter what or who it is and no matter how good or bad it is thought to be. Oliver wanted people to realize that all life is sacred. The second difference between Whitman and Oliver’s poems is how the characters came to an epiphany surrounding death. In Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, the boy doesn’t initially have an epiphany surrounding death after the bird disappears and never returns; he finally gets an epiphany when the sea whispers something to him, “Delaying not, hurrying not, Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak, Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death” (Whitman 76). In The Black Snake, the narrator has an epiphany surrounding death the moment the snake dies and they drive away; they didn’t need to have something else show or

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