"All that tread, the globe are but a handful to the tribes, that slumber in its bosom"
About this Quote
Bryant takes a planetary victory lap and then yanks the camera straight underground. The line flatters human bustle - all that tread the globe - only to shrink it to a “handful” compared with the “tribes” sleeping in the earth’s “bosom.” It’s classic Romantic scale-shift: the living imagine themselves as the story, but the dead are the real majority, an unseen nation that makes our headlines feel like footnotes.
The diction is doing quiet heavy lifting. “Tread” suggests both travel and trampling, a faint critique of human restlessness and entitlement. Against that, “slumber” softens death into something intimate rather than horrific, and “bosom” turns the planet into a maternal body. Bryant isn’t just reminding you that you’ll die; he’s reframing burial as return, an absorption back into a larger, older collectivity. Nature is not scenery here. It’s the ultimate archive.
Context matters: Bryant wrote as an early American poet when the young republic was loudly inventing itself, expanding its borders, and preaching progress. This line punctures that self-mythology with geological humility. Empires, revolutions, and daily striving become temporary surface noise, while the earth keeps accumulating generations beneath. The subtext isn’t nihilism so much as democratic leveling: fame, class, and power all end in the same bedrock. The sentence works because it offers consolation and correction at once - you are small, yes, but you also belong to an immense human continuity that the ground itself holds.
The diction is doing quiet heavy lifting. “Tread” suggests both travel and trampling, a faint critique of human restlessness and entitlement. Against that, “slumber” softens death into something intimate rather than horrific, and “bosom” turns the planet into a maternal body. Bryant isn’t just reminding you that you’ll die; he’s reframing burial as return, an absorption back into a larger, older collectivity. Nature is not scenery here. It’s the ultimate archive.
Context matters: Bryant wrote as an early American poet when the young republic was loudly inventing itself, expanding its borders, and preaching progress. This line punctures that self-mythology with geological humility. Empires, revolutions, and daily striving become temporary surface noise, while the earth keeps accumulating generations beneath. The subtext isn’t nihilism so much as democratic leveling: fame, class, and power all end in the same bedrock. The sentence works because it offers consolation and correction at once - you are small, yes, but you also belong to an immense human continuity that the ground itself holds.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
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