“Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop'd flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crepe-veil'd women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour'd around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs - where amid these you journey,
With the tolling bells' perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you a sprig of lilac.”—Walt Whitman, from “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865)
John Wilkes Booth’s shooting of Abraham Lincoln on this date in 1865—the first time an American President died from an assassin’s bullet—plunged the nation into an abyss of grief, all the deeper and symbolic because of the date—Good Friday. The extended mourning also inspired this magnificent Walt Whitman elegy, one of the greatest poems in the English language.
As a schoolchild, it’s very likely that you had to read another Whitman poem on the death of Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” Even an otherwise very fine anthology, The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation, edited by Diane Ravitch, includes “Captain” instead of “Lilacs.” My guess is that you see the former more often than the latter because it is a) shorter and easier to permit many more pieces in the anthology, and b) rhyming, which is easier for young minds to remember.
But “Lilacs” is a far superior poem. Put it this way: almost anyone could have written “Captain,” but only Whitman could have created “Lilacs.” It is the tribute of one distinctly American literary voice to another.
“Lilacs” bears comparison to the most famous Lincoln speech, the Gettysburg Address, because both:
* honor those who died as a result of the war (Lincoln speaking of the Union dead, Whitman of a President felled by a fanatical Southern sympathizer);
John Wilkes Booth’s shooting of Abraham Lincoln on this date in 1865—the first time an American President died from an assassin’s bullet—plunged the nation into an abyss of grief, all the deeper and symbolic because of the date—Good Friday. The extended mourning also inspired this magnificent Walt Whitman elegy, one of the greatest poems in the English language.
As a schoolchild, it’s very likely that you had to read another Whitman poem on the death of Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” Even an otherwise very fine anthology, The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation, edited by Diane Ravitch, includes “Captain” instead of “Lilacs.” My guess is that you see the former more often than the latter because it is a) shorter and easier to permit many more pieces in the anthology, and b) rhyming, which is easier for young minds to remember.
But “Lilacs” is a far superior poem. Put it this way: almost anyone could have written “Captain,” but only Whitman could have created “Lilacs.” It is the tribute of one distinctly American literary voice to another.
“Lilacs” bears comparison to the most famous Lincoln speech, the Gettysburg Address, because both:
* honor those who died as a result of the war (Lincoln speaking of the Union dead, Whitman of a President felled by a fanatical Southern sympathizer);
* derive from ancient forms (Lincoln, as Garry Wills noted in Lincoln at Gettysburg, from Greek Revival oratory; Whitman, from the pastoral elegy, used by poets as diverse as Virgil, Milton and Shelley);
* achieve their great symbolic power through the movement from death to rebirth (Lincoln, going from the carnage of the battlefield to the “new birth of freedom” he hoped for the reunited nation; Whitman, progressing from the “black murk” surrounding the martyred President to the lilac, which blossoms with the return of spring);
* use parallel clauses to create their hypnotic rhythms (Lincoln preferred short phrases, most famously “government of the people, by the people, for the people”; Whitman employed enormously long but grammatically correct phrases beginning with “With”); and
* progress from anguish and loss to reconciliation (Lincoln, toward a national reunion of North and South; Whitman, to renewed joy in life).
Though the assassination occurred on April 14, Lincoln’s funeral procession only began its 1,600-mile journey by rail a week later, finally ending with the President’s interment back home in Springfield, Ill., on May 4.
Like just about every American, Whitman could recall, in Specimen Days, where he was when he learned of Lincoln’s death: "The day of the murder we heard the news very early in the morning. Mother prepared breakfast—and other meals afterward—as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass'd them silently to each other."
Whitman, a longtime supporter of the President, had also volunteered as a nurse during the war, so the phrase “bind up the nation’s wounds” held literal as well as symbolic meaning as he listened to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. (Another listener in the audience that day, ironically, was Booth.)
An enthusiastic but subpar balladeer, Lincoln established a new standard in American oratory by putting aside florid, allusive rhetoric in favor of concise, sinewy language that—like the Old Testament verses he knew by heart but probably did not believe—built to moments of stunning power. Whitman’s poems—especially this one—were every bit as revolutionary and liberating in impact as Lincoln’s speeches.
Both men, devout believers in what Whitman called Democratic Vistas, also freed Americans of their thralldom to borrowed, foreign literary forms. They left listeners and readers changed, moved, blinking in astonishment at what they had just experienced—voices that sounded like themselves, but grander, summoning what Lincoln termed “the better angels of our nature.”
Though the assassination occurred on April 14, Lincoln’s funeral procession only began its 1,600-mile journey by rail a week later, finally ending with the President’s interment back home in Springfield, Ill., on May 4.
Like just about every American, Whitman could recall, in Specimen Days, where he was when he learned of Lincoln’s death: "The day of the murder we heard the news very early in the morning. Mother prepared breakfast—and other meals afterward—as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass'd them silently to each other."
Whitman, a longtime supporter of the President, had also volunteered as a nurse during the war, so the phrase “bind up the nation’s wounds” held literal as well as symbolic meaning as he listened to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. (Another listener in the audience that day, ironically, was Booth.)
An enthusiastic but subpar balladeer, Lincoln established a new standard in American oratory by putting aside florid, allusive rhetoric in favor of concise, sinewy language that—like the Old Testament verses he knew by heart but probably did not believe—built to moments of stunning power. Whitman’s poems—especially this one—were every bit as revolutionary and liberating in impact as Lincoln’s speeches.
Both men, devout believers in what Whitman called Democratic Vistas, also freed Americans of their thralldom to borrowed, foreign literary forms. They left listeners and readers changed, moved, blinking in astonishment at what they had just experienced—voices that sounded like themselves, but grander, summoning what Lincoln termed “the better angels of our nature.”
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