Question

In poem A PSALM OF LIFE,why is port tell in about the graves?

Answer 1

oem against death would be useless, but not a poem against those who might be called the “living dead,” or people who are alive but seem dead on their feet, because they have given up any but the most necessary struggle or challenge and instead seek comfort as their paramount goal. Who are these people? Probably those hit too hard or too many times by circumstances or events. Longfellow was thirty-one when he wrote “A Psalm of Life,” likely writing it to fight back the inertia of depression overtaking him after the death of his wife from the complications of a miscarriage in the latter part of 1835. Her death, he feared, would lead to his own “death,” which means, at least, his ability to live as a writer. Longfellow wrote “A Psalm of Life,” therefore, partially to gain back his will to be a public writer. The psalmist could either be Longfellow’s downcast self, or someone else—someone making a practice of writing morbid verse, or perhaps a depressed person incapable of getting past suffering, pain, or death. The young man fervently attempts to convince the psalmist—who is probably older than him—that one must get past sorrow, yet be sober about what the future may or may not bring and exist in the present, since, in terms of time, the past is dead and the future not yet alive. If one acts in the present, the only time that is fully alive, one gains the best chance of being present to others, enlivening them.