the Garden of Eden, but this is a garden from which the Eve cannot emerge no matter how much she may wish to do so.
The home as a place of refuge fails in Poe as well, for the image of the home that emerges from his writings is of a dangerous place where many of his heroes turn when they withdraw from the outside world. They cannot escape from themselves, however, and are often destroyed even as they try to protect themselves with the trappings of home. Roderick Usher in "The Fall of the House of Usher" lives entirely in a domestic locale, unable to leave the house even as it disappears into the tarn. He has withdrawn from the outside world but cannot escape the inner turmoil that caused him to so do. The same is true of the protagonist of "The Raven," for the memories he tries to elude come to him in the form of the Raven and make him remember all that he would like to forget.
In Walt Whitman, domesticity is often depicted in terms of being comfortable within oneself, which for Whitman means not just accepting but celebrating the body in which we live. He expresses this view even when recounting his grief, as in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," a poem in which the home becomes tarnished by the death of Lincoln and the grief this occasions. Whitman expresses his own deep mourning at this loss and uses the occasion to consider more generally the issue of loss and mourning. The carol of the songbird offers a consolation for the poet as he is enmeshed in his grief both for the fallen president and for all mankind, since everyone must die at some time. The expression of the songbird became much more than this, however. It is not that the poet hears the song and is brought back from his reverie and from his thoughts of death. Rather, the songbird expresses a new attitude toward death, the attitude that the poet has developed as he muses and communes with nature. This expression holds that death is a natural th...