"A Summer's Evening Meditation"

At first glance, this piece reads as one about space and all its' entities. It's interesting because she describes space so vividly when the study of space wasn't really a thing yet.

Barbauld's poem, "A Summer's Evening Meditation," raised interesting points about death and the afterlife at a time where a vast majority of people believed that their souls were either going to heaven or hell. She depicts a completely different scenario of life after death, where her soul is free to travel the universe and is able to learn infinite amounts of knowledge and the mysteries of the universe. I find it interesting that she believes space travel to be a benefit of death. What event in her life made her come to this conclusion?

In this piece she contemplates the limits of creation and its' essence. Much of the piece is her praising higher powers and divine entities, but she doesn't ever specifically refer to "God," which is also interesting to me since this time period was very much centered around the church. I wonder if her views on the afterlife and her attitude towards death would have been misconstrued during that time, or if they would have agreed with her, or at least embraced her views on the afterlife.

She also recognizes that we, as humans, are minuscule on a much grander scale. She knows that there's a vast universe out there, and that the possibilities are endless. He attitude about death is so positive, as opposed to the typical melancholy that people usually express when they talk or think about death. I feel as if she has almost has a moment of enlightenment while pondering the afterlife and the unique possibilities associated with it.