ing and even a desirable thing that releases the individual from the cares of this world, which is a world of pain and evil as well as of beauty. The first line of the poem shows this new attitude: "Come, lovely and soothing Death,/ Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,/ In the day, in the night, to all, to each,/ Sooner or later, delicate Death" (133-136). The last lines along might make the reader think this was a matter of resignation, that since everyone dies, it is necessary to submit and accept the inevitable. Whitman goes further than this, however, as can be seen by that first line which defines the meaning of what follows: "Come, lovely and soothing Death." Domesticity is celebrated more traditionally by Anne Bradstreet in her poems of love for her husband, while domesticity might seem to be a near-prison for Emily Dickinson, though her imagination takes her far from her home even as it serves as a primary subject for her work.
2. Images of women in American fiction for much of our history tended to relegate women to th
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