William Cullen Bryant's poem, “The Prairies,” expresses the beauty he first encounters of America's prairies and contrasts the beautiful and abundant image of an alive nature; “And fresh as the young earth, ere man had sinned/ The Prairies. I behold them for the first,” with the grim inevitability of death within the prairie. But from what death takes nature always gives back even when man has made it difficult to continue (495-497). Through juxtaposed images of life and death; Bryant is able to show their correlation, and personify nature to paint a beautiful, and haunting image of the prairies and early America. Bryant begins the poem by describing the prairies as a garden of the desert (line 1). This first introduces the idea of ampleness,
