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Tide Rises The Tide Falls

Decent Essays

Human and Nature Nature brings plenty of benefits to people’s lives. For example, a forest stands silent guard over a river to prevent water loss. It means people cannot live without nature. Romanticism played an important role of emphasizing writer’s emotion, individualism, and imagination in the 18th century. William Cullen Bryant expresses the beauty of nature in his poem “Thanatopsis”. In the poem “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls”, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow uses ocean to reflect his view of life. Another poet called James Russell Lowell uses his poetry “The First Snowfall” to show the connection between human and nature. The use of rhetoric and literary devices convey that the value of nature is to help people have a positive thinking …show more content…

He gives the waves the human qualities of having hands by using personification. Bryant describes that the tide wash away traveler’s footprints in the sands. He writes, “The little waves, with their soft white hands, efface the footprints in the sands” (line 8). The wave hands represent the death. The footprints represent memories. The tide washes away people’s memories after death. It means a new beginning, because new people will come to the sands and leave their footprints. Longfellow tells that life still goes on with or without people. He wants to let the readers understand that the difficulties will pass, because the sea will wipe the world’s memories clean. Longfellow also uses rhetoric devices in his poem. The use of repetition conveys the cycles of the natural world, because the tide always goes up and goes down. He uses the constant theorem of nature to reflect death. He writes, “And the tides rises, the tide falls” (line 15). People always try to escape from death but they cannot. Nature already used her way to tell us the constant rule of death. “The tide rises, the tide falls” is the progression of time and death. Longfellow expresses that people should not afraid of this progression. All people must undergo this process, so they must accept this. Nature reveals the life attitude that people should have. There is another poet tries to guide people in a positive way to think

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