What Do I Read Next?
- "Life," featured in Alexander Witherspoon and Frank Warnke's Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry (1963), is another poem by Herbert from The Temple. Similar to "Virtue," it centers on the theme of nature's decay, which mirrors human destiny.
- In "On My First Son," a 1603 lyric also included in Witherspoon and Warnke's Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry (1963), Ben Jonson mourns the loss of his seven-year-old son. Jonson attempts to reconcile his deep sorrow with the thought that death has spared his child from earthly troubles, placing him in a state to be envied rather than lamented.
- In Act 4, Scene 2, of his play Cymbeline (c. 1612), William Shakespeare presents a mournful song, "Fear No More the Heat of the Sun." The singers find solace in accepting death's inevitability and its role as a liberator from worldly concerns.
- Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" (1648), included in The Works of Robert Herrick (1823), also ponders the fleeting nature of time. Unlike Herbert's "Virtue," Herrick encourages seizing the day and fully enjoying life's offerings before they vanish.
- The second poem in A. E. Houseman's collection A Shropshire Lad (1896), "Loveliest of Trees," is a short lyric where the poet reflects on nature's beauty with the awareness that it is he, not nature, who will ultimately perish.
- In "Spring and Fall to a Young Child" (1880), found in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1931), Hopkins explores life's transience from the perspective of an older man contemplating a young girl's experience of autumn.
- In "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" (c. 1945), included in The Poems of Dylan Thomas (1952), the Welsh poet passionately urges a fierce resistance to death, advocating for clinging to life until the very end.
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