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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Blooming Flower
From the first line of the first canto, the speaker of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” identifies lilacs as the place marker for his grief. As a perennial, lilacs return every year to remind the speaker of his loss, forever altering the meaning of spring. No longer a reminder of life and renewal, spring now marks a violent anniversary. Even in the speaker’s grief, though, he takes consolation that the lilacs also provide a visceral reminder of his lost friend. The poem’s focus on natural imagery—the lilac’s fragrance and their “heart-shaped leaves of rich green” (Canto 2, Lines 2 and 5)—celebrates the speaker’s ability to transport back to a particular emotional place—even a sorrowful one—in remembrance. This transformative experience in the terrain of observation, correspondence, and art furnishes the poem’s central themes.
Lilacs grew outside the door to Whitman’s mother’s home. Whitman learned of Lincoln’s assassination while visiting his mother, so the lilacs can be seen as a literal representation of Whitman’s experience.
In traditional symbolic floral language, varieties of lilacs symbolize first love and innocence. Their short blooming cycle might be seen to convey the transitory nature of young love, though here the short life cycle works as a metaphor for Lincoln’s untimely death. The flower’s name derives from the Greek word for “pipe” because of their mythic association with the demigod Pan. After the nymph Syringa transforms into a lilac bush to escape Pan’s unwanted attention, Pan uses the pipe-shaped blooms to make a flute to play in expression of his love for Syringa. While Pan’s transformation of sorrow into art comes from a darker, more predatory place, Whitman selects lilacs to fashion a song from his grief as well.
Whitman’s catalogue-like documentation of American flora, fauna, population, and geography in other works marks him as a deep observer; while it might seem to be too convenient that a symbol like lilacs happened to be available, it’s worth considering that many other plants probably grew at the Whitman home. It’s the poet’s eye and assimilating mind that imbues even the most ubiquitous objects with meaning. Even the letters in the flower’s name create an echo of Lincoln’s, underscoring the inescapable recurrence of grief.
The Hermit Thrush
Whitman specifically relies on the hermit thrush as his singer in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” because the species establishes a distinctly American context. Its Latin name, Catharus guttatus, shares a root with “catharsis” –the purging of negative emotions evident in the poem.
Much like the fortuitous lilacs, the migratory behavior of hermit thrushes would place then in Whitman’s path. The hermit thrush’s song, like the lilacs, shares an association with the flute: While the lilacs mirror the flute’s shape, the hermit thrush echoes its sound. Musical analysis of hermit thrush songs finds their pitch related to human music more than the songs of other birds. Through the lilac and the hermit thrush, Whitman arranges the serendipitous art occurring in nature—specifically an American natural terrain—to demonstrate the country’s collective mourning and to define American art as an expression in harmony with its spiritual identity rooted in place.
The Western Star
The speaker calls the western celestial body in “Lilacs” a star, but he actually addresses Venus. During spring, the planet normally appears low in the west; it also disappears for days during its orbit as it nears the sun. Whitman’s reference to the “surrounding cloud” (Canto 2, Line 5) refers to Venus’s cloudy atmosphere—a discovery from the previous century.
The image of a bright western light near the horizon at sunset works on multiple levels as a metaphor for Lincoln, but the planet Venus and its celestial position during the spring of 1865 provides an even closer association. On March 4, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, the assembled crowd witnessed an unusual daytime sighting of Venus. Early morning clouds gave way to sunshine as Lincoln prepared to address the large audience, which included poet Walt Whitman. According to Lincoln’s bodyguard Sergeant Smith Stimmel, the president observed the planet once the crowd began pointing at what many viewed as a kind of omen.
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By Walt Whitman
