When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the most innovative and challenging of his Lincoln memorial poems, Whitman addresses the roles of time and memory in grief. He also explores the relationship between public, communal mourning and individual grief, recasting the ceremony and commemoration often found in public mourning within private rituals and meditation. Like Whitman’s most inventive, transgressive works, “Lilacs” expands to “contain multitudes” (“Song of Myself,” 51, Line 8) while revealing the most inward and intimate personal reflection.

The poem begins with a half-truth—or a projection. Whitman composed “Lilacs” in summer after Lincoln’s assassination, so Whitman’s address to the returning spring in Lines 4-5 of the first Canto (“trinity sure you to me you bring / Lilac blooming perennial […]”) cannot yet have happened. Whitman here imagines the spring to come, and all the future springs inevitably to come, in which the lilacs’ image and scent will likewise return him to the moment he learned of Lincoln’s death. Long before brain research quantified associations between sensory perception and memory, Whitman intentionally employed iconic and olfactory imagery as a means of preserving his love for Lincoln and the impact of the sudden loss.

Three images guide the speaker’s meditation throughout the poem: The lilacs, the western star, and the singing bird comprise the “trinity” (Canto 1, Line 4) each returning spring brings. Following the tradition of elegiac poems like Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Whitman avoids identifying Lincoln in the poem. But the western star—the planet Venus—would have appeared low in the sky at the time of the assassination, just as the lilacs would have been in full bloom. Whitman often described Lincoln’s “western” (Canto 1, Line 2) lack of pretension as one of his noble qualities, so the star’s appearance not only locates the poem at the time of the assassination, but provides an apt designation for Lincoln and is more a metonym (a word used as a substitute for something else with which it is associated) than a metaphor.

The lilacs also locate the poem in time, full spring, and the speaker’s location: Whitman received the news of Lincoln’s death while visiting his mother. The memory of death becomes inextricable with an image already connected with maternity and home, forever changing the speaker. The speaker comes to understand that lilacs—their scent and image—now mean something different, and the transformation cannot be reversed. Whitman the poet occupies a role beyond the speaker’s grief and uncertainty. As the architect of his own memory, he adopts the lilacs as a totem of his broken heart, even down to the letters in common between “lilac” and “Lincoln.” Beyond his speaker’s scope, the poet understands that grief must be honored and commemorated so life can continue. That commemoration takes shape in art forged from death—as in the thrush’s song—which stands as the most human and alive.

The sections of the poem—sometimes called strophes or cantos—represent episodes in the progression of grief and understanding. The speaker moves between calm, meditative moments, and outbursts of sorrow, all of which are reflected in shifting tone, diction, and poetic structure. The speaker appears to soothe himself with extended repetition, incantatory anaphora (a word used to refer to or replace a word used earlier to avoid repetition). The repeated “O,” for instance, in the second canto frames a cathartic unfolding of dark images representing the speaker’s experience of loss as each image is introduced with a cry of woe. In Canto 6, the anaphora in Lines 3 through 11—repeating “with the” at the beginning of each line—orders the outward expressions of mourning across the country as Lincoln’s coffin makes its way through towns and among citizens. The speaker places himself among the mourners both as a demonstration of respect and as a way of finding consolation in shared grief.

Beyond witnessing and chronicling the events, the speaker interjects his physical presence by placing the lilac sprig from the last line of the third canto—“a sprig with its flower I break” (Canto 3, Line 13)—onto the casket in the last line of Canto 6. This gesture, like Whitman’s contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne’s extended rose from the prison bush at the beginning of The Scarlet Letter, breaks a boundary created in text. As Hawthorne reaches out to the reader, Whitman reaches out to Lincoln through his speaker and his text. Whitman did not see the funeral procession in person, and while the speaker of “Lilacs” calls up the image of the procession in emotional detail, he and his narrative remain ethereal and imagined. The space of poetry and narrative allows an action to happen that cannot be realized in the literal world. But the enacted ritual carries the same spiritual consolation. Both Hawthorne and Whitman pluck their flowers from a plant adjacent to a threshold, the place where one space gives way to another.

Another contemporary’s work may influence Whitman in Canto 8; in this canto, the speaker imagines an interaction with the “western orb” (Canto 8, Line 1) representing the fallen President. But the interaction maintains the structure and properties of a celestial body, reminiscent of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” from his essay “Nature.” In the essay, Emerson describes becoming “part or particle of God,” which is a similar sentiment to Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” from “Song of Myself.” For Whitman, the expansive perception he seeks verges less on the divine and more toward the encompassing of humanity in all its forms and diversity. But this passage in “Lilacs” draws on elements of the spiritual and physical, as the speaker senses that in “the transparent shadowy night” (Canto 8, Line 3), his guiding star seeks to deliver a message to him. Whitman uses the natural phenomenon of Venus’s low position in the sky as a setting for an imagined interaction; this symbol of Lincoln thereby becomes a portend for his doom. The speaker finds he can understand “what you must have meant” (Canto 8, Line 2) when, a month earlier, the star “droop’d from the sky low down as if to my side” (Canto 8, Line 5) with “something to tell” (Canto 8, Line 4). Just as Lincoln’s name never appears, the speaker never articulates the star’s secret woe. The reader cannot know whether the message stemmed only from the speaker’s interpretation of signs, or whether a supernatural announcement may have taken place. The speaker only describes the mood, the star “full of woe” (Canto 8, Line 7), the “sad orb” (Canto 8, Line 10) that drops beyond the horizon, out of the speaker’s gaze.

In an Emersonian sense, the speaker unifies with the orb, understanding its emotion, and later understanding its pointed message. The night twice described as “transparent” (Canto 8, Lines 3 and 8), provides a medium for the speaker’s transcendence—his communion with not only this spirit but with the larger natural world as it reflects universal mourning.

The third anchoring image in “Lilacs”—the thrush—introduces an element beyond the speaker and the lost leader. The “solitary” (Canto 4, Line 3) bird and his song first appear in Canto 4, but readers cannot hear the song until Canto 14. Readers hear the speaker’s song offered in the way he offers the sprig of lilac to the coffin. Incidences of direct address in the poem most often refer to the bird and the bird’s song; the first direct address occurs in Canto 4 when the speaker calls the thrush “dear brother” (Canto 4, Line 7) and acknowledges his song, without which “thou would’st surely die” (Canto 4, Line 8). The speaker sings, too, and his song anchors him to life just as the hermit thrush’s song does.

The bird sings his song alone: “[D]eath’s outlet song of life” (Canto 4, Line 7). Cantos 5 through 8 contain the speaker’s song; in Canto 7, the speaker refers to the “chant” he sings for “sane and sacred death” (Canto 7, Line 3); like the bird, the speaker sings a death song. The bird and speaker in “Lilacs” prefigure the boy on the beach and the “solitary guest from Alabama” (“Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking,” Line 51)—the lonely singing bird in Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking.” “Out of the Cradle” documents mourning and artistic expression, weaving such ideas even more thoroughly than “Lilacs,” but it brings together ideas initiated in “Lilacs.” “Out of the Cradle” recounts Whitman’s awakening as a poet as he hears the bird’s song of death echoed back by the whispering sea. A reader familiar with the lonely bird and bereaved speaker of “Lilacs” knows the sea’s only response to the child must be “death” (“Out of the Cradle,” Line 168).

The speaker periodically addresses the bird as he continues singing his own song. In Canto 9, he reassures the solitary thrush: “I hear your notes, I hear your call” (Canto 9, Line 2), but the star, “my departing comrade” (Canto 9, Line 5), holds him still. The speaker practices a motif from other elegies and tributes by rhetorically wondering how he should commemorate his lost friend in Cantos 10 and 11. The grave should be scented, he says, with “sea-winds blown from east and west” (Canto 10, Line 4); the burial-house must be decorated with “all the scenes of life and the workshops” (Canto 11, Line 11). Whitman enfolds the land and people into Lincoln’s memory, perpetuating the personal and public memorial gesture. From these cantos, the poem expands to include the universal beyond the particular—Whitman’s last tribute to Lincoln’s significance is beyond personal and even beyond civic. In Canto 13, the speaker again turns to the bird, “dearest brother” (Canto 13, Line 4), announcing the star “will soon depart” (Canto 13, Line 8), leaving him to his task as a singer.

Even after publication, Whitman revised the poem’s final three cantos, combining what once had been seven sections into three. Cantos 14, 15, and 16 depict phases in the speaker’s recognition of death, his acceptance of its truth, and his reconciliation to what his life now must be. In Canto 14, the speaker experiences an epiphany that prefigures the child’s understanding of death as the driver of art in “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking.” The canto begins with the speaker’s observation of dusk; he seems to float above the world, describing the terrain in detail. The motion of life buzzes under the calm sky; the speaker recounts the “minutia of daily usages” (Canto 14, Line 9) observed. In a sudden shift, the “long black trail” (Canto 14, Line 12) interrupts everything, covering the cities and countryside, and “enveloping me with the rest” (Canto 14, Line 11.) Once the darkness sets in, the speaker says “I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death” (Canto 14, Line 12). The speaker walks “in the middle as with companions” (Canto 14, Line 15) between the knowledge of death and the thought of death. The speaker hides in the night “that talks not” (Canto 14, Line 16) in the stillest, quietest moment of this poem that often chronicles action and imaginative thought. Within the forest darkness, the speaker at last repeats the hermit thrush’s song.

As the bird’s song unfolds, the speaker translates: “[T]he voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird” (Canto 14, Line 27). The song begins with an invocation and praises to death: “Come lovely and soothing death” (Canto 14, Line 28), “delicate death” (Canto 14, Line 31), “sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death” (Canto 14, Line 35), the “dark mother” (Canto 14, Line 36) and “strong deliveress [sic]” (Canto 16, Line 39). The bird’s song—and the speaker’s—praise death for its equanimity, its inevitable cycle, and its expansive acceptance. The speaker appears to learn through the bird’s song of the universe’s progression that ends with the respite of death. The two figures—knowledge of death and thought of death, his “companions” from Line 13 of Canto 14 through the end of the poem—represent different but necessary perspectives of death. The thought of death brings sorrow, the pain of lost love, and ultimately the most acute artistic experiences. The sacred knowledge of death offers consolation and resolution to the spirit, knowing that the pattern of the universe fulfills and renews itself.

The experiences of Canto 14 prepare the speaker and the reader for Canto 15’s vision and Canto 16’s revelation. In Canto 15, the speaker sees “long panoramas of visions” (Canto 15, Line 8), armies of the dead, bloody corpses, and “debris of all the slain soldiers” (Canto 15, Line 17). The speaker realizes “they are not as was thought” (Canto 15, Line 18) and that the dead “were fully at rest” (Canto 15, Line 19) while the living remain to suffer. Pain, then, reminds humans of the facts of life; sensory experience, the ability to love and mourn, suffering—all these factors define humans as living beings.

The poem circles back to the dominant images as the speaker recognizes “lilac and star and bird twined within the chant of my soul” (Canto 16, Line 21). The speaker revisits exact images from earlier in the poem, beginning the first three lines of the canto with “passing,” showing how he reviews and moves past the birds’ song, the lilacs’ leaves, and the dooryard. The speaker arranges his position with care: He remains “communing with thee” (Canto 16, Line 12), facing the western star, holding on to the two figures of death. The song, the “chant of my soul” (Canto 16, Line 21), remains. The “this for his dear sake” (Canto 16, Line 18) means the poem; the work of art itself is what was made for his sake. After the realization and transformation “there in the fragrant pines and cedars dusk and dim” (Canto 16, Line 20), the poem remains.