26 pages • 52 minutes read
Walt WhitmanWhen Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Whitman as a Poet of National Identity
Whitman volunteered to care for wounded soldiers during the American Civil War; now, as the war finally seemed to be ending, hope for the country’s renewal vanished with the sudden loss of their leader. Envisioning his role as the voice of the people, Whitman struggled to express an avalanche of sentiment and disbelief. His grief was personal; Whitman wrote about his admiration for Lincoln and attended his second inauguration in March before the April assassination.
“Lilacs” came third among the poems dedicated to Lincoln’s memory, following the more conventional “O Captain, My Captain!” Preceding that, “Hush’d Be the Camps Today,” dated four days after Lincoln’s death, speaks from the soldiers’ point of view and serves as a memorial to soldiers lost in the war. In “Lilacs,” Whitman found balance between public and personal, addressing both the national mourning and his personal sorrow in a more daring lyric form than its more conventional predecessors.
“O Captain, My Captain” employs an extended metaphor in which a young sailor laments the loss of his leader. With its conventional motifs, use of rhyme, and in the details of its narrative, the poem harks back to Felicia Dorothea Hemans’s “Casabianca,” a popular 1826 work based on a tragic incident from the Battle of the Nile in which the son of a ship’s commander died during a sea battle. The boy remained at his post until his death at the ship’s explosion, rather than deserting the upper deck without leave from his father, the commander, who lay dead below deck. Often memorized and recited in elementary schools at the time, Hemans’s poem epitomized Victorian sentimentality and nationalistic fervor. The dramatic scene for “O Captain, My Captain” echoes “Casabianca” in the boy alone on the ship’s deck, pleading for guidance from his lost captain.
Whitman tired of reading “O Captain, My Captain” and complained about its inferiority, but complied with audience demand for his dramatic delivery of the emotional poem. The Lincoln poems represent a microcosm of Whitman’s work: Pieces popular during his time did not always represent his most experimental or enduring work. “Lilacs” stands as Whitman’s most pointed creation of American context and voice. Simultaneously personal and public, the poem and its speaker stand as thoroughly original and independent yet bound to a community unified in its diversity. As Whitman composed Lincoln’s elegy, the threat of the war still reverberated. Though the surrender at Appomattox Court House had been signed, violence persisted and wounds had not healed. The elegy mourns the leader who might have led the nation to healing, it mourns the nation that might have existed, and it anticipates the work to come.
Literary Context: Whitman’s “Lilacs” and Elegiac Traditions
Whitman’s adherence to certain conventions of elegiac poetry make his departures from those traditions more significant in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” His four poems written in proximity to Lincoln’s death demonstrate his effort to bring a particularly American perspective to elegy, as he had renovated poetic form, scope, and voice to fit the American landscape and temperament.
The Romantic movement in England, inspired by works like Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” embraced the contemplative tone of the elegy, adopting its conventions for any lyric reflecting on interior emotion. In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman also moves beyond the use of elegy as a memorial for the dead; his poem elevates to a meditation on the soul’s reflection in nature, the perpetual cycles of death and rebirth, and the artistic process’s inextricable connection to trauma and pain.
Like many elegies, Whitman’s poem omits Lincoln’s name. The gesture allows the reader to bring knowledge to the poem; it enlists the reader to become part of an intimate circle of grief. Poems like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.” reinforce the sense of absence by including only the deceased’s initials in the title as part of his lament. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821) substitutes the name “Adonais” for Keats—the subject of the elegy—thereby elevating Keats to the status of myth and harking toward classical elegiac poetry. Shelley also invokes Milton’s elegy “Lycidas,” another work in the tradition of pastoral elegies in which the lost loved one appears as a mythic figure. The practice allows the elegist to praise and memorialize the deceased while also creating a more universal instrument of mourning. The traditional pastoral elegy mourns all premature losses of youth and potential. Whitman’s poem acknowledges the pastoral tradition by choosing natural metaphors and by associating Lincoln with a mythic image—the western star. But Whitman’s expansive descriptions of cities and his use of associated images rather than metaphors give his lyric a powerful realism much more visceral than the idealized setting of pastoral elegies.
Traditional elegies promote catharsis by lamenting individual death, recounting positive attributes of the deceased, and deriving consolation in nature, philosophy, religion, or other contexts. While “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” may not explicitly follow that model in its narrative, its transition from a poem about an individual death to a poem about community and the creation of art—both of which are rooted in the most basic human urges of connection and communication—affirms both life and death as natural and necessary.
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By Walt Whitman
