Whitmans Lilacs in Context

Kaye Kagaoan

Walt Whitmans 1865 poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd is best known as an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, yet one that makes no explicit mention of the fallen president or the circumstances surrounding his death. Still, the poems historical context plays a significant role in its meaning; it is hard to separate the poems form and content from the events of Whitmans contemporary present. An analysis of the language in Lilacs through the lens of context allows for a much deeper understanding of this poem as a reflection of the difficulty in composing a personal elegy for a public figure. As Whitman demonstrates in Lilacs, such a task calls for an inevitable transition from the specific to the universal from the personal to the national. Despite this thematic progression in the poem, Lilacs exhibits Whitmans mastery of his craft as an individual: though the poem speaks to and for a nation, they remain to be words of one man. On the formal level, the use of the pastoral elegy in Whitmans Lilacs is an attempt to predetermine its future significance, both as a work of literature and an historical document. By employing this form, Whitmans poem is set against a historical background of other renowned works such as John Miltons Lycidas and Percy Bysshe Shelleys Adonas. However, despite assuming this form, Whitman omits many elegiac conventions in Lilacs. In his essay, Whitmans Lilacs and the Tradition of Pastoral Elegy, Richard P. Adams points out that, out of seventeen devices commonly used in pastoral elegies from Bion to Arnold, seven appear in Lilacs (Adams 479). Adams list on the conventional thematic content of the elegy does not include how, additionally, Lilacs rejects the lyrical verse of its forms predecessors in favour of free verse. Yet this rejection of form seems necessary to impose the authority of Whitmans voice due to the highprofile subject of his elegy: Lycidas was written about one of Miltons former classmates, while Shelley wrote Adonas after the death of his friend and fellow poet, John Keats. By loosely adapting the form of the elegy in Lilacs, Whitman asserts his voice as an individual, not only in the historical context of a national lamentation for Lincoln, but also as a poet whose work could join the renown of his predecessors. Despite his unconventional treatment of the form, Whitmans use of pastoral elegy in Lilacs is most fitting for the context of its subject, particularly the indirect treatment of Lincoln as

a lingering memory that pervades the speakers thoughts. Though Whitmans process of writing Lilacs began almost immediately after [Lincolns] assassination and was completed within weeks (French), the poem is set years after the subjects passing; thus, the events in this poem that resonate with the progression of the traditional elegy are displaced from the actual time of death. The symbolism introduced in the poems opening lines signifies the speakers repeated state of mourning: 1 When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomd, And the great star early droopd in the western sky in the night, I mournd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love. (Whitman 459) In the poems opening, spring acts not primarily as a symbol of new life, but as a trigger that revives the speakers grief over his love, the drooping star in the west that stands for the longpassed Lincoln. The repetition of ever returning spring, along with the juxtaposition of great star and drooping star within this opening section, suggests the cyclical nature of this mourning. Adams, along with many other critics, identifies the star symbol as Venus, the evening and also the morning star (Adams 481). Throughout the poem, the star holds the speaker in a state of mourning until he finally goes to the swamp and reconciles with the idea of death. Yet the arrival of spring also revives a widespread mourning that extends past the individual speaker, as the fifth and sixth sections of the poem illustrate a funeral procession, where Night and day journeys a coffin (Whitman 460). Thus, the intimacy of the poems opening lines is slightly misleading: although the speaker projects a personal sentiment towards the star, it remains to be publicly visible, just as Lincoln was a publicly known and loved figure. The speaker and Whitman must concede to the truth that his mourning is not merely his own but that of an entire nation. However, before doing so, Whitman imprints his voice and emotion in Lilacs through the three symbols that dominate and interweave throughout the poem. In his commentary essay on Lilacs, R.W. French points out that while the lilac, the hermit thrush, and the aforementioned star accumulate meaning as the poem develops (French), their contextual significance in the poem leads directly to Whitman. The lilac and the star, as well as their temporal appearance in the spring, are not inherently symbols of mourning; however, they gain new symbolic meaning through Whitman. Lincoln was assassinated on the fourteenth of April; Whitman uses this historical association to attribute spring to a season of grief, and both lilacs and western star gain their 2 Kaye Kagaoan, 2014

meaning from the temporal context of the mourning (Steele 11). In addition, the hermit thrush acts somewhat as Whitmans double in the poem: 4 In the swamp in secluded recesses, A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song. Solitary the thrush, The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings by himself a song. Song of the bleeding throat, Deaths outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know, If thou wast not granted to sing thou wouldst surely die.) (Whitman 459-460) The fourth section of Lilacs introduces the hermit thrush as a solitary creature, much like the poems speaker, yet one who feels an irresistible urge to sing its song of the bleeding throat. The speaker refers to the thrush as dear brother, and later voices out his struggle as an elegist: O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? / And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? (Whitman 462). These lines suggest that the speaker feels like the thrush as he struggles to privately mourn for a public figure, yet still has the unstoppable desire to continue his song. However, the speaker not only identifies with the thrush but also looks to it for guidance, as most Romantic works express a preference for nature as the place for enlightenment and the pursuit of truth. Later in the poem, when the star droops away and the scent of lilacs have also faded, the speaker finally arrives at the swamp, he listens to the thrushs song and comes to reconcile with death. It is important to note that the speakers reconciliatory experience at the end of the poem is not merely over the death over a single individual, but over death in general; the seventh section of Lilacs acts as the poems turning point, as the speaker shifts his discourse from Lincolns death to the death of any American. As Desire Henderson writes, Despite Whitmans attempts to render Lincoln an everyman, his particularity continues to erupt into the text No other victim of [the Civil War] was granted the elaborate funeral rites that met Lincolns corpse (Henderson 121). In Lilacs, Whitman strikes a balance between individual and collective grief, since Lincoln as with any public figure received an inevitably public mourning. Just as the speaker describes giving a sprig of lilac to the Lincolns publicly circulating coffin, he rescinds the intimacy of his act in a striking parenthetical aside: Nor for you, for one alone, / Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring (Whitman 461). The speaker, thus, extends his mourning to all coffins, and further 3 Kaye Kagaoan, 2014

expanding the subject of his elegy from the individual Lincoln whose name is never mentioned in the poem to an elegy for Americans and death itself. Furthermore, Adams attributes Whitmans decision not to name Lincoln in Lilacs to his carefulness never to celebrate the individual at the expense of the general (Adams 480). Indeed, Whitmans response to the challenge of such an elegy includes the general, and the knowledge of death that the speaker encounters towards the end of the poem involves visions not of Lincoln but of the unburied many who died in war. In the poems eleventh section, the speaker laments, O what shall I hang on the chamber walls? / And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, / To adorn the burial-house of him I love? (Whitman 462). At this point in the poem, the speaker seems to have returned to talking about Lincoln, yet the growing vagueness of him I love has stretched its meaning to more than a single entity. The speaker answers his own enquiry by fantasising decorations of quintessentially American images: Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes, With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright, With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air, With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific, In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there, With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows, And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys, And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning. (Whitman 462) The speaker continues onto the twelfth section of the poem, listing images in a free-flowing way that mimics Whitmans earlier poem, Song of Myself. In these sections Whitman juxtaposes mourning with celebration, as an elegy typically interweaves the two concepts; however, by speaking for both Lincoln and America in general, Whitman offers the nations scenes of life not only to a single president, but also to the masses whose death allowed the nations sprawling life and beauty to become a reality. Towards the end of Lilacs, the speaker approaches the swamp in solitude, like the thrush, finally separated from the public processions and, as with the tradition of the pastoral elegy, comes to his new knowledge of death. Though surrounded by nature, the song of the thrush subjects the speaker to visions of violence and war imagery: 4 Kaye Kagaoan, 2014

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them, And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war, But I saw they were not as was thought, They themselves were fully at rest, they sufferd not, The living remaind and sufferd, the mother sufferd, And the wife and the child and the musing comrade sufferd, And the armies that remaind sufferd. (Whitman 466) As with the speakers mourning, which progresses from a difficult personal task to an inevitably public act, his visions during the thrushs song depict myriads rather than a single individual. Thus, the sacred knowledge of death (Whitman 464) is twofold. On the poems literary level, Max Cavitch argues that this imagery suggests not only the achievement of memorial piety but also the improved sociability that begins with the recognition of the grievances of the living the word sufferd becomes a kind of refrain, chanting the persistence of disruption, even as the poet anticipates his withdrawal from this scene of vigilant mourning (Cavitch 276). On a contextual level, these visions of myriads suggest that eulogising a public figure such as Lincoln must also involve eulogising those who died for his vision, hence this poems transition from the personal to the public, and then, by the end of the poem, back to the personal. Only after the speaker regards the myriad as much as the individual dead does he experience reconciliation and a conclusion to the eulogy. However, the resemblance between the listing and repetition in Lilacs and many of the sections in Song of Myself stands out less because of their similarity than their contrast; unlike Song of Myself, which indulges in cacophonous anaphora and repetition, Whitman exhibits an immensely superior level of control over the language in Lilacs. Apart from the burst into the thrushs song in the fourteenth section, the sixteen sections that comprise Lilacs are much more condensed than the fragmented sections in Song of Myself. Whitmans eulogy begins with fragmentation and mends itself albeit bleakly at the end by mirroring the speakers reconciliation with the interconnection of the poems three central symbols: lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul (Whitman 467). Yet in the context of this poems form as an elegy, its place in Whitmans contemporary present, as well as the poems present-day readership, the numerous revisions that led up to the final version of Lilacs, the illusion of meticulous poetic craft that pervades this poem isnt so surprising. In the tenth section of the poem, the speaker addresses the thrush, O how shall I warble myself / And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? (Whitman 462). The reflexive phrasing of warble myself, suggests that Lilacs is not merely Whitmans elegy for Lincoln, or even for America: this poem is also his elegy for himself. 5 Kaye Kagaoan, 2014

Works Cited Adams, Richard P. "Whitman's "Lilacs and the Tradition of Pastoral Elegy." Modern Language Association. 72.3 (1957): 479-487. Web. 4 Mar. 2014. Cavitch, Max. American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 244-285. eBook. French, R.W.. "'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' [1865]." The Walt Whitman Encyclopedia. The Walt Whitman Archive, n.d. Web. 4 Mar 2014. Henderson, Desire. "Lincoln's Unrest: Walt Whitman and the Civil War Cemetery." Trans. Array Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 117-125. Web. 9 Mar. 2014. Steele, Jeffrey. "Poetic Grief-Work in Whitman's "Lilacs"."Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 2.3 (1984): 10-16. Web. 9 Mar. 2014. Whitman, Walt. "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1982. 459-467. Print.

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