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Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

Like Longfellow’s poem, Arnold’s great lyric verse anxiously contemplates the relationship between oceanic tides and the human condition.

Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

Oliver’s poem is worth reading in relation to Longfellow’s, particularly for the way the speakers of both poems find some kind of consolation in the natural world, despite their anxieties about life and death.

Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night”

The speaker of Thomas’s famous villanelle repeatedly urges an anonymous addressee to resist death. This defiant response to mortality stands in contrast to the distanced, impersonal vision offered in Longfellow’s poem. Even so, the two poems make for an illuminating comparison.

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