Fedora |1 Chelsea Fedora ENGL 3563 November 1, 2013 Close Reading #2

The Roman Empire of the Americas: Will We Fall? Despite a lengthy passage of time, the Roman Empire stands as the pinnacle of civilization, despite its later fall. In William Cullen Bryant's poem, "The Prairies," the narrator reflects upon the possibility of a civilization once equal with that of Ancient Rome, but he realizes the sad truth that all groups of people will eventually fall. "The Prairies" looks at a possible past of the West and, more poignantly, a possible future for the rising empire of America. In his exploration of the Gardens of the Desert, Bryant praises the prairies of America (Bryant, 1). He describes the lands around him as boundless and beautiful/And fresh as the young earth, ere man had sinned (2-3). To his eyes, America is a veritable Eden of the New World. Though he sees it in a pure state of nature, comparing it to a magni ficent temple of the sky, he also cannot believe that it has not once been touched by some other people before him (29). He imagines a disciplined and populous race comparable to the Greeks and the Romans at the height of their empire (46). However, they disappeared as the American Indians claimed the land. As Bryant describes it, the warlike and fierce American Indians came in to take over the land, but all that is said at this point is that the mound-builders disappeared (59). No other details are given until the latter half of the poem. One can sense that Bryant could not imagine that the mound-builders would have vanished from the earth without something, or someone,

Fedora |2 forcing them out in some way (60). While The Prairies may seem like William Cullen Bryant is simply reminiscing about the possibilities of a great, undiscovered civilization resting beneath the amber waves of grain, this poem is less about a lost civilization and more about how great peoples always risk falling. Moving into the second half of The Prairies, William Cullen Bryant paints a picture of a civilization at its violent end. While it can be taken literally, it may also prophesy the fall of the United States. As the plains were heaped/With corpses, brown vultures hovered by to take what they could from the carnage (70-71). One can hope that will not happen now, but one can see how enterprising vultures can swarm around a dying society on the brink of failure. Bryant does not refer to one group of people alone when he points out that races of living things, glorious in strength,/perish, as the quickening breath of God/Fills them, or is withdrawn (8788). In these lines rest Bryants warning to his readers of the time that while it may seem to be the United States God-given right to succeed and grow across the lands to the west, the hand of God could just as easily be taken away. The final line, I am in the wilderness alone, leaves the reader with a somber note of Bryant in solitude in a land once possibly teeming with life only to return to wilderness (124). The opening glory of The Prairies delays William Cullen Bryants later musing on the passage of great civilizations. While it may be taken at face-value as imagining the rise and fall of a long-dead civilization, one can find far more depth in the poem when considering its implications on the American civilization when Bryant was writing and how it has evolved to the present day. One can only hope that the current society will not be massacred as that of the mound-builders.

Fedora |3 Works Cited Bryant, William Cullen. The Prairies. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume B. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2012. 126-128. Print.