This poetry from 1865 is one of several works created in response to Lincoln’s
Despite the format, this is regarded as a pastoral elegy:
I cry and will continue to lament even after I never return when the lilacs in the dooryard cease to bloom and the great star early begins to droop in the western sky at night.
I lamented and will continue to lament the perpetual return of spring when the lilacs in the front yard last bloomed and the huge star early in the night drooped in the western sky.
What author wrote the elegy When lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom D?
One of Walt Whitman’s most famous poems is titled “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Whitman was an American poet (1819-92). Whitman delivers an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, who had been killed not long before Whitman penned the poem, over the course of 206 lines of inventive free poetry. Before reading our analysis below, you can read ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ here.
Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” takes its title from the moment he learnt of Lincoln’s passing in April 1865. Whitman saw the lilacs were in bloom when he went outside his mother’s New York apartment while he was there to see his mother and brother. This seems to have been the inspiration for Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, albeit the poem wasn’t finished until a few months later (more of which below).
Over time, the poem’s organization evolved a little. Whitman was notorious for modifying his work after its initial publication, but the version we presently read (in most copies) is the 1881 one. The final version is divided into 16 sections, while initially it had 21.
Let’s examine “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’dlanguage “‘s and imagery in more detail. Since the poem has over 200 lines, we won’t analyze every single one; instead, we’ll focus on some of the important passages:
Whitman declares in the beginning of the poem that he mourns for the President, who is only referred to as “him,” and that he will continue to mourn for him. Whitman compares Lincoln to a star that has fallen or dropped “early” from the western sky (with “western” here referring to both the sky where the sun sets and the western world of which America is a part) since Lincoln died before his time.
Lincoln is still referred to by Whitman as a fallen star. (An apostrophe is a rhetorical device used to refer to a deceased or absent person; in this case, it is Abraham Lincoln.) Whitman describes “shades of darkness” (also known as “shadows of night”), “black fog,” and a “harsh encircling cloud” that binds and stifles the poet’s soul in order to express his anguish at Lincoln’s murder. His sorrow also feels like someone is squeezing him and rendering him helpless.
A common image in pastoral poetry is the hermit thrush. Whitman informs us that it is spring and that songbirds are singing, yet the idea of a “solitary” and “secluded” bird singing at such a sad moment for the poet has a whiff of pathetic fallacy.
Whitman salutes the coffin as it carries Lincoln’s remains to rest in Section 6 of the poem, as the entire country is in mourning. This was true of the grief-filled public uproar that followed Lincoln’s murder. (And “crape-veil’d women” anticipates Auden’s well-known lines from his famous elegy about wrapping crepe veils over the necks of the “public doves”).
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d is, in some ways, unlike your typical elegy, as the poem progresses further. The fact that Abraham Lincoln is never specifically mentioned in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” despite the fact that it is an elegy for him, is one of its most noteworthy features. Lincoln is not explicitly named in the poem, but rather by implication. However, this should not come as a surprise to us since Milton’s well-known elegy “Lycidas,” written in honor of the youthful poet Edward King, refers to King only by the pastoral name of “Lycidas” rather than by name.
Whitman was a pioneer of free verse, therefore his poem may appear to be unorthodox in structure, but from one angle, it can be viewed as a typical pastoral elegy. The poem appears to want to transcend the confines of such classification, much like Whitman’s free poetry wants to escape the constrictions of conventional meter, despite the fact that Whitman incorporates some of the trappings of traditional elegy.
It is simultaneously an elegy honoring Abraham Lincoln and a poem about sorrow on a much larger scale, or perhaps the inability to mourn because of how overwhelming things have become. Lincoln was assassinated near the close of the American Civil War, a fight that left many families grieving the loss of loved ones.
Because of this, several poets and critics have tried to categorize “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” differently than the name “elegy for Lincoln” may imply. For instance, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) referred to the poem as a “nocturne,” or a poem for the night. And while Whitman wrote the poem with the assassination of Lincoln very much in mind, he didn’t really begin composing it until a few months after Lincoln’s passing (although he started keeping notes as soon as the day after).