The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls

Emily Dickinson and Henry Longfellow both expressed strong themes through their poetry, particularly themes centered on death and passing. Two specific works of theirs provide the answer to how their portrayal of these themes compares and contrasts. The first is “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” by Henry Longfellow and the second is “Before I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson. In “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls,” the poem has a narrative of a traveler who enters a quiet town from the sea and never returns. It is never stated directly that the traveler has died, but the following lines could imply it;
“The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.” Either way, despite what happens to the traveler, the repetition of “The tide rises, the tide falls” conveys the insignificance of the traveler in the grand scheme of life. The traveler’s departure from the earth is already washed away, both metaphorically and physically when the waves erase his first footsteps from the shore. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, the theme is still centered on death but
The two were in no hurry, and overall in the poem the ride is seen as fairly pleasant considering it ended with the speaker’s death. Therefore the theme of death for this is that death will come unexpected, but it’s not a huge deal and can be seen as a happy ending that leads to the afterlife. Both poems convey in at least some margin that death is no big deal, and that the rest of the world keeps moving on. Further evidence of this is that in “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” is how the town is described the day after the traveler arrives and how the tide continues to rise and fall despite the traveler’s actions. But in "Before I could not stop for Death,” death is still seen as something important but not so dreary, as it is something that happens to everyone and may arrived