William Cullen Bryant Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by William Cullen Bryant with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
Image design Botanical Sage
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“So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm,”
Meaning & context
Bryant turns the poem’s long meditation on universal mortality into an appeal to live in a way that makes eventual death less degrading or fearful.
Source details
“Thanatopsis,” represented in Project Gutenberg #29700. These lines begin the poem’s closing counsel after its extended description of death and nature; the language is poetic and spiritual rather than clinical end-of-life guidance.
Source identified2
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“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;”
Meaning & context
Bryant expresses confidence that truth can survive temporary defeat and re-emerge even when public power, violence or opinion appears to have buried it.
Source details
“The Battlefield,” represented in Project Gutenberg #29700. The line belongs to a civic-religious meditation on conflict, sacrifice and moral endurance; its resurrection imagery expresses poetic conviction rather than a literal law of history.
Source identified3
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“In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright.”
Meaning & context
The speaker takes the waterfowl’s guided migration as a religious image of trust that his own solitary path can also have direction.
Source details
“To a Waterfowl,” represented in Project Gutenberg #29700. The closing lines explicitly infer providential guidance from the bird’s flight; the claim remains Christian-inflected lyric reflection, not evidence about supernatural intervention.