Life and Death

After reading the seventh poem that Whitman wrote I thought about a very common thought nowadays which is the idea of seizing the day. This means enjoying everything about life, all about it. At the beginning of this poem he states, “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?”(Poem 7) This clearly states the idea of enjoying every second of our lives since we are so lucky of experiencing one.

After a very positive first line, we read, “I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it”. (Poem 7) Here we hear again the idea that when you die you do on to the next life which is so much better than this one. But I was captivated by the last part of this line, “and I know it”. Here the author is saying that he has experienced it, death. I thought about this for a couple of seconds and could not find an answer to this. What exactly does Whitman mean with this?

Same Style

In the final parts of A Simple Soul we see the continuation of Flaubert’s style, the same style he has used the entire book. In chapter five we see a great example of description of all the things in the scene. “In the middle stood a little frame containing relics; at the corners were two little orange-trees, and all along the edge were silver candlesticks, porcelain vases containing sun-flowers, lilies, peonies, and tufts of hydrangeas”.(Chapter V) As you can see from this part, the author describe everything carefully to give us good picture of what is going on. Besides this, Flaubert talks about the church again in this same paragraph, “The clergy appeared in the yard”. (Chapter V) This shows how he continues the same style throughout the whole book.