"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is a long poem written by American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) as an elegy to President Abraham Lincoln. It was written in the summer of 1865 during a period of profound national mourning in the aftermath of the president's assassination on 14 April of that year.
The poem, written in free verse in 206 lines, uses many of the literary techniques associated with the pastoral elegy. Despite being an expression to the fallen president, Whitman neither mentions Lincoln by name nor discusses the circumstances of his death in the poem. Instead, he uses a series of rural and natural imagery including the symbols of the lilacs, a drooping star in the western sky (Venus), and the hermit thrush, and he employs the traditional progression of the pastoral elegy in moving from grief toward an acceptance and knowledge of death. The poem also addresses the pity of war through imagery vaguely referencing the American Civil War (1861–1865), which effectively ended only days before the assassination.
Written ten years after he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" reflects a maturing of Whitman's poetic vision from a drama of identity and romantic exuberance that has been tempered by his emotional experience of the American Civil War. Whitman included the poem as part of a quickly written sequel to a collection of poems addressing the war that was being printed at the time of Lincoln's death. These poems, collected under the titles Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, range in emotional context from "excitement to woe, from distant observation to engagement, from belief to resignation" and "more concerned with history than the self, more aware of the precariousness of America's present and future than of its expansive promise". First published in autumn 1865, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"—along with 42 other poems from Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps—was absorbed into Leaves of Grass beginning with the fourth edition, published in 1867.
The poem is one of several that Whitman wrote on Lincoln's death. Although Whitman did not consider the poem to be among his best, it has been compared in both effect and quality to acclaimed works of English literature, including T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
Writing history and background
In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Whitman established his reputation as a poet with the release of Leaves of Grass. Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic and developed a free verse style inspired by the cadences of the King James Bible. The small volume, first released in 1855, was considered controversial by some, with critics attacking Whitman's verse as "obscene". However, it attracted praise from American transcendentalist essayist, lecturer, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, which contributed to fostering significant interest in Whitman's work.
At the start of the American Civil War, Whitman moved from New York to Washington, D.C., where he obtained work in a series of government offices, first with the Army Paymaster's Office and later with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He volunteered in army hospitals as a "hospital missionary". His wartime experiences informed his poetry, which matured into reflections on death and youth, the brutality of war, and patriotism, and offered stark images and vignettes of the war. Whitman's brother, George Washington Whitman, had been taken prisoner in Virginia on 30 September 1864, and was held for five months in Libby Prison, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp near Richmond, Virginia. On 24 February 1865, George was granted a furlough to return home because of his poor health, and Walt Whitman travelled to his mother's home in New York to visit his brother. While visiting Brooklyn, Whitman contracted to have his collection of Civil War poems, Drum-Taps, published.
The Civil War had ended, and a few days later, on 14 April 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending the performance of a play at Ford's Theatre. Lincoln died the following morning. Whitman was at his mother's home when he heard the news of the president's death; in his grief he stepped outside the door to the yard, where the lilacs were blooming. Many years later, Whitman recalled the weather and conditions on the day that Lincoln died in Specimen Days, where he wrote:
Lincoln was the first American president to be assassinated, and his death had a long-lasting emotional impact in the United States. During the three weeks after his death, millions of Americans participated in a nationwide public pageant of grief, including a state funeral, and the 1,700-mile (2,700 km) westward journey of the funeral train from Washington, through New York, to Springfield, Illinois.
Lincoln's public funeral in Washington was held on 19 April 1865. Whitman biographer Jerome Loving believes that Whitman did not attend the public ceremonies for Lincoln in Washington, as he did not leave Brooklyn for the nation's capital until 21 April. Likewise, Whitman could not have attended ceremonies held in New York after the arrival of the funeral train, as they were observed on 24 April. Loving thus suggests that Whitman's descriptions of the funeral procession, public events, and the long train journey may have been "based on second-hand information". He does concede that Whitman in his journey from New York to Washington may have passed the Lincoln funeral train on its way to New York—possibly in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Whitman may have recalled the imagery of lilacs from his earliest home, now the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site, which still boasts lilacs blooming in the farmhouse dooryard.
Publication history
On 1 April 1865, Whitman had signed a contract with Brooklyn printer Peter Eckler to publish Drum-Taps, a 72-page collection of 43 poems in which Whitman addressed the emotional experiences of the Civil War. Drum-Taps was being printed at the time of Lincoln's assassination two weeks later. Upon learning of the president's death, Whitman delayed the printing to insert a quickly-written poem, "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day", into the collection. The poem's subtitle indicates it was written on 19 April 1865—four days after Lincoln's death. Whitman was unsatisfied with the poem and resolved to write a fitting poem mourning Lincoln's death.
Upon returning to Washington, Whitman contracted with Gibson Brothers to publish a pamphlet of eighteen poems that included two works directly addressing the assassination—"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!". He intended to include the pamphlet with copies of Drum-Taps. The 24-page collection was titled Sequel to Drum-Taps and bore the subtitle When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd and other poems. The eponymous poem filled the first nine pages. In October, after the pamphlet was printed, he returned to Brooklyn to have them integrated with Drum-Taps.
Whitman added the poems from Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps as a supplement to the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass printed in 1867 by William E. Chapin. Whitman revised his collection Leaves of Grass throughout his life, and each additional edition included newer works, his previously published poems often with revisions, and reordering of the sequence of the poems. The first edition (1855) was a small pamphlet of twelve poems. At his death four decades later, the collection included around 400 poems. For the fourth edition (1867)—in which "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" had first been included—Leaves of Grass had been expanded to a collection of 236 poems. University of Nebraska–Lincoln literature professor Kenneth Price and University of Iowa English professor Ed Folsom describe the 1867 edition as "the most carelessly printed and most chaotic of all the editions" citing errata and conflicts with typesetters. Price and Folsom note that book had five different formats—some including the Drum-Taps poems; some without.
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and his other three Lincoln Poems "O Captain! My Captain", "Hush'd be the Camps To-day", "This Dust Was Once the Man" (1871) were included in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass, although in Whitman's 1871 and 1881 editions it was separated from Drum-Taps. In the 1871 edition, Whitman's four Lincoln poems were listed as a cluster titled "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn". In the 1881 edition, this cluster was renamed "Memories of President Lincoln". The collection was not substantially revised after this edition—although later editions saw new poems added. Leaves of Grass has never been out of print since its first publication in 1855, and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is among several poems from the collection that appear frequently in poetry anthologies.
Analysis and interpretation
Structure "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is a first-person monologue written in free verse. It is a long poem, 206 lines in length (207 according to some sources), that is cited as a prominent example of the elegy form and of narrative poetry. In its final form, published in 1881 and republished to the present, the poem is divided into sixteen sections referred to as cantos or strophes that range in length from 5 or 6 lines to as many as 53 lines. The poem does not possess a consistent metrical pattern, and the length of each line varies from seven syllables to as many as twenty syllables. Literary scholar Kathy Rugoff says that "the poem...has a broad scope and incorporates a strongly characterized speaker, a complex narrative action and an array of highly lyrical images."
The first version of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" that appeared in 1865 was arranged into 21 strophes. It was included with this structure in the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass that was published in 1867. By 1871, Whitman had combined the strophes numbered 19 and 20 into one, and the poem had 20 in total. However, for the seventh edition (1881) of Leaves of Grass, the poem's final seven strophes of his original text were combined into the final three strophes of the 16-strophe poem that is familiar to readers today. For the 1881 edition, the original strophes numbered 14, 15, and 16 were combined into the revised 14th strophe; strophes numbered 17 and 18 were combined into the revised 15th strophe. The material from the former strophes numbered 19, 20 and 21 in 1865 were combined for the revised 16th and final strophe in 1881. According to literary critic and Harvard University professor Helen Vendler, the poem "builds up to its longest and most lyrical moment in canto 14, achieves its moral climax in canto 15, and ends with a coda of 'retrievements out of the night' in canto 16."
Narrative While Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is an elegy to the fallen president, it does not mention him by name or the circumstances surrounding his death; it compares Lincoln's completed life with the transient and short-lived beauty of flowers in full bloom. This is not atypical; Whitman biographer Jerome Loving states that "traditionally elegies do not mention the name of the deceased in order to allow the lament to have universal application". According to Rugoff, the poem's narrative is given by an unnamed speaker, adding:
According to Vendler, the speaker's first act is to break off a sprig from the lilac bush (line 17) that he subsequently lays on Lincoln's coffin during the funeral procession (line 44–45):
Style and techniques