Rip Van Winkle Vs Washington Irving Essay

Steve Maraboli, an accomplished public speaker, author, and Behavioral Scientists, has been accredited with writing “[l]ook around you. Everything changes. Everything on this earth is in a continuous state of evolving, refining, improving, adapting, enhancing…changing. You were not put on this earth to remain stagnant,” (Maraboli). As Maraboli’s quote suggests, everything is in a constant state of change; people, nature, and society, to name a few. When reflecting on history, we can see more concrete evidence of change through the evolution of technology, music, and literature with different eras, from the Baroque to Classical, from the days of horse drawn carriages to automobiles and so much more. Rarely, one notices the changes in abstract …show more content…
One of the most significant differences between these two periods is that, whereas many of the works throughout the Colonial period seem to be centered around God and religion, the Federalist period’s emphasis on these themes is less pronounced. In Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, the protagonist of the story, Rip Van Winkle, goes “to one of the highest parts of the Kaatskill mountains,” (Irving 4) and encounters an individual dressed in dated attire. Van Winkle stops to help the mysterious man with items that he is carrying, pausing every now and then as sounds pique his interest, but he continues on his journey. In Irving’s world, the nature of man is as equally if not more as mysterious as the nature around it. Rip Van Winkle expresses on multiple occasion how peculiar the situation he finds himself in is, and metaphorically shrugs it off and continues with whatever it is he is doing. Van Winkle drinks with the mysterious man and others in the party and falls into a deep sleep, only to wake up in the same place where he originally saw the strange man. Now, however, his dog has vanished and his gun is rusted. When he returns home, he finds that he doesn’t recognize any of the people there and they don’t recognize him. The nature of man and nature itself, as Washington Irving presents it in Rip Van Winkle, is essentially …show more content…
Like the name of the era suggests, the Dark Romantics tended to view nature as unknown and horrifying in many ways. This is most evident in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”. In the piece, the speaker of the poem confronts a raven that is perched above the narrator’s door only to hear the creature’s constant reply of “Nevermore” (Poe 48). The theme of nature throughout the piece is one that nature is something that cannot be changed by man and the raven is representative of death; the inevitable nature of all living beings. At the beginning of the piece, the narrator is lamenting the loss of “the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore” (11), a direct reflection of the idea that nature is immutable; man can only experience it, not play a role in its manufacturing. As the piece progresses, the speaker becomes increasingly restless at the Raven’s inability (or reluctance) to say anything other than “nevermore” (48). In the final stanzas, the speaker begins to associate the raven with a demon, furthering his parallels to the creature being a representation of death as he addresses a Prophet, “"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil---prophet still, if bird or devil! / By that Heaven that bends above us---by that God we both adore,” (91-92). Nature, then, is something that is predetermined and formed by a supernatural power and mankind cannot do anything to change or influence it, they can