Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings.

These lines come from William Cullen Bryant’s early nature poem “Thanatopsis,” first published in 1817 (and later revised). Written when Bryant was still a young man, the poem helped establish his reputation as a leading American poet of the early nineteenth century. “Thanatopsis” is framed as a meditation on death that turns to the natural world for consolation and instruction, in the manner of Romantic poetry. The speaker urges the reader to leave indoor anxieties and attend to Nature as a moral teacher, using the landscape and the cycles of life and decay to place individual mortality within a larger, shared order.

The imperative “Go forth” casts Nature as a living text whose “teachings” can be heard by anyone willing to step outside and listen. In “Thanatopsis,” this counsel is not mere pastoral escapism: Nature’s lesson is ultimately about mortality and belonging. By contemplating the open sky and the earth’s processes, the reader is invited to exchange private fear for a wider perspective—death becomes a universal condition, and the individual life is re-situated within an immense, continuous whole. The lines encapsulate Bryant’s Romantic faith that the natural world offers spiritual and ethical insight without requiring formal doctrine.

“Go forth, under the open sky, and list / To Nature’s teachings,”