Ay, thou art for the grave; thy glances shine
Too brightly to shine long; another Spring
Shall deck her for men's eyes---but not for thine ---
Sealed in a sleep which knows no wakening.
The fields for thee have no medicinal leaf,
And the vexed ore no mineral of power;
And they who love thee wait in anxious grief
Till the slow plague shall bring the final hour.
Glide softly to thy rest then; Death should come
Gently, to one of gentle mould like thee,
As light winds wandering through groves of bloom
This is How I Really Feel – Poetry as an Outlet 
 While going through Bryant’s biography, I stumbled upon a small note that covered the sickness of his beloved sibling Sarah and his response to her illness. While the biography says next to nothing about how he really felt and failed to expand anything else in regards to her sickness and eventual death, the biography states that Bryant wrote this short sonnet in response. 
 While sonnets are normally recognized for love (mutual, unrequited, or otherwise), death was a common theme in Shakespearean  and later sonnets. Shakespeare himself wrote his first 17 sonnets on growing older and dying, Edgar Allan Poe wrote  To My Mother  as a eulogy to the deceased Aunt that raised him, John Donne’s  Death, to not proud  was about the inevitability of death, and Heath Bailey’s  Sonnet to Death  described death the way an angsty preteen would do so. 
 In short, death was a common theme in sonnet-writing and Bryant was using sonnets as an outlet grief, akin to Poe’s  To My Mother . 
 Links to the mentioned Sonnets: 
 
 
 
 Note – Shakespeare’s sonnets being specifically about death might be a bit of a reach: he wrote those 17 successive sonnets as more a response to a youth so beautiful that he must procreate so that while he may die eventually, his image will live on in his children. It’s more pushing towards “make beautiful babies because you are a beautiful person” instead of “woe is me, death takes all eventually”.
Consumption