“Reluctance” is a poem that shows the speaker’s very negative, scared and reluctant view of death. The speaker believes that it will be a

The descriptions are decidedly downcast. The speaker starts to emphasize the positives about death in the next stanza. “Dead men alone are satiate” shows another characteristic of the dead men. They are satisfied and can be at peace with their former lives, something that the speaker in “Reluctance” was trying to achieve. “They sleep and dream and have no weight, / To curb their rest, of love or hate” tells the reader what dead men do and cannot do with their time. In fact, these men spend their “dead” time much like many living people – just sleeping and dreaming. They have no power over anything and “no weight.” When the speaker mentions that they have “no weight,/ to curb their rest, of love or hate” he presents another point that the reader can interpret several ways. One is that the dead men’s thoughts are not given an afterthought while another interpretation is that this refers to the ghostly bodies that they now inhabit. The most commanding thought deals with the fact that the days of feeling intense love or hate, as one would experience in life, are over for the speaker. “Think me strange who longs to be / Wrapped in their cool immunity” expresses a thought that is a complete opposite to that expressed in “Reluctance.” This speaker “longs” to be like and in the company of the dead men while the speaker in “Reluctance” is just that – reluctant – to face his impending death. The speaker in “The Wise” compares his views to those of others who fear death and feels “strange.” The dead also have a certain immunity and are protected from things with which they do not wish to come in contact.

betrayal of himself and his life to accept that it is over. “I have climbed the hills of view / And looked at the world, and descended;” are two

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