Two peers of Whitman: Elizabeth Oakes Smith and William Cullen Bryant

The first things I notice from Elizabeth Oakes Smith's "An Incident" and William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis" are strong feels of images of nature, especially so in Bryant's poem. The speaker in Smith's poem encounters a force of nature -- the noble eagle -- that drops a part of itself (a feather) that she finds. There is a sort of disconnection between the speaker and the eagle, for she is unlike the creature and "would not soar like thee, in loneliness to pine". She herself feels that she cannot be as expansive, which is a contrast to Whitman's open, great reign to be one with nature and himself.  In Bryant's poem, he personifies nature and mentions how one may bond and "hold Communion with her visible forms". There is a familiarity with nature, just like how Whitman advocates one to embrace nature for him/herself by submerging oneself with it and experiencing it all for oneself; to let the Earth supply one with a state of being not found outside of its grasp, as "Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, and, lost each human trace, surrendering up thing individual being, shalt thou go to mix for ever with elements,  to be a brother to the insensible rock and to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain turns with his share, and treads upon."

In regards to form, both poems, like Whitman's "Song of Myself," possess a form in which the first word of every (complete) line is always capitalized. Perhaps this was the standard norm for poetry, as it begins a new idea/image/thought/etc. within the text. Smith's and Bryant's poems have some sort of rhyme scheme taking place; while Smith's is more prominent and straightforward (following that of a Shakespearean sonnet; meter is similar to that sonnet as well following some iambic pentameter that's played straight), Bryant's resembles more like Whitman's with perhaps more rhyming to appear -- yet there's no pattern, just the prevalence of some rhyme. Free verse, something that is more common in the present, suggests the openness to freedom and perhaps reflects that bond between open nature and oneself.