On April 14, 1865, the American president and first lady went to Ford’s Theater to celebrate. A few days earlier, Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate army, surrendered his troops to Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union army, and the brutal United States Civil War seemed to be at its end. At the theater, actor John Wilkes Booth presented his card to the guard and was admitted to the President’s box, where he shot and mortally wounded Abraham Lincoln.

During the summer of that same year, Walt Whitman wrote “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” one of four poems he composed during the national time of mourning, amidst his personal grief for the loss of a figure he saw not only as a great leader, but as a parallel spirit. Whitman saw Lincoln’s role in politics as parallel to his own role as a poet as he envisioned it: a champion of the common man, a representative of the voiceless, an advocate for all Americans.

Along with “This Dust Was Once Man,” “Hush’d Be the Camp Today,” and “O Captain, My Captain,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” represents a grief transcending individual death or any temporal location. Whitman expresses the entire nation’s disbelief and sorrow by adopting multiple points of view for each poem, finally taking a personal point of view in “Lilacs”—the most innovative and lyrical of the quartet.

Whitman and his publisher hurried the poems into print; in 1865, an edition of the poet’s Civil War collection Drum-Taps appeared with Sequel to Drum-Taps, originally subtitled “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In 1867, Whitman published a new edition of Leaves of Grass, the collection he continued to revise and reprint throughout his career. This fourth edition included the poems from Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, including “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

The 1867 edition of the poem includes 21 cantos; in later editions of Leaves of Grass, Whitman consolidated several cantos until reaching the 16-canto version most often anthologized today. That version first appeared in the 1881 edition, in which Whitman combined the final seven cantos into three.

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” falls within the tradition of personal elegies rooted in friendship and love, sustaining a lyric intimacy with noteworthy absences and resonant detail. Yet it expands to encompass a national identity, acknowledges the war’s collective trauma, includes a meditation on the cycles of renewal in nature, and establishes connections between death and the artistic impulse—ideas that firmly entrench the poem in the transcendentalist movement.

Poet Biography

American poet Walt Whitman bears the title of the first truly American poet, conferred by academics, historians, and critics. With fellow 19th century poet Emily Dickinson, he both physically and ideologically established a new poetic style and form to fit the expansive nation. Born on Long Island and living most of his life in Brooklyn, Whitman’s poetic, spiritual identity spanned the entirety of the United States.

Like Benjamin Franklin, Whitman worked for a printer to learn his craft. He left school at 11 to go to work, mostly due to his family’s limited income. Whitman continued to choose the role of outsider and iconoclast throughout his adult life. After a short interval of teaching, Whitman founded his own newspaper, The Long Islander. Also like Franklin, Whitman wrote advice under an assumed name and recommended activities for living a vigorous, masculine lifestyle. He serialized his own novels, contributing to work for other newspapers around New York, and was often fired for his political beliefs. At the time, Whitman embraced Free-Soil Party rhetoric, calling for a halt to the expansion of slavery into the territories, but stopping short of abolition. Whitman’s views changed during the war.

By mid-century, Whitman began experimenting with verse based on biblical cadence. European meters, he believed, could not sustain a great American epic poem. By 1855, the first slim version of Leaves of Grass appeared with no author’s name on the spine or the title page. Instead, a confrontational portrait of a man dressed as a worker, his hip cocked and hat at a jaunty angle, looks back at the reader from the frontispiece.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a letter of endorsement. Many others found 12-poem text—including “Song of Myself”—profane, brazen, obscene, or disturbing. For the rest of his poetic career, Whitman republished Leaves of Grass including new material with each edition and revising older works. With each publication, the book caused controversy for its free verse structure, its sexually explicit language, its spiritual experimentation, and its political implications. Later, the book cost him what probably would have been his best job—a post at the Department of the Interior where he was fired after only a few months when the new Secretary of the Interior located a copy of Whitman’s verse.

During the American Civil War, Whitman journeyed south out of concern for his enlisted brother’s safety. By the time he located his brother, who had been superficially wounded, Whitman had seen enough of the war’s destruction that he decided to go to Washington, D.C. where he found work and volunteered as a nurse in the military hospital. His experiences in the South and working in Washington led to Drum-Taps, a sequence of war poems, and a change in views on the abolition of slavery. By 1856, Whitman wrote in favor of abolition.

Editions of Leaves of Grass, each with new material, appeared in 1867 and 1871, with an English edition of Poems of Walt Whitman in 1868 that brought Whitman new popularity and international influence. After a stroke in 1873, Whitman retired from Washington to his brother’s house in Camden, New Jersey. Eventually moving to his own house, Whitman remained in New Jersey for the rest of his life, spending time in Laurel Springs and Camden. More editions of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1876, 1881, 1889, and finally in 1891, just before his death.

Whitman’s influence on American poetry extends to all styles and types, from Ezra Pound to the Beat poets of the 1950s and 60s. His frank sexuality and gender fluidity made him an inspirational figure for LGBTQ artists. Latin American literary figures like Pablo Neruda, Jose Marti, and Jorge Luis Borges admired Whitman’s capturing of national identity and emotional range. European authors like Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker saw him as an embodiment of the modern; Stoker maintained a correspondence with Whitman until the latter’s death.

Many contemporary readers find Whitman through American film Dead Poets’ Society in which students at a repressive boarding school stand on their desks and shout “O Captain! My Captain!” to protest a beloved teacher’s dismissal. Whitman felt “O Captain! My Captain!” represented one of his most conventional poems, and would have deemed it a failure sans its entertainment value. It’s his most conformist piece and the only poem anthologized during his lifetime. But in Whitman’s wisdom, he knew that a poem like “O Captain! My Captain!” could bring readers to poems like “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

Poem Text

Whitman, Walt. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” 1865. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Walt Whitman orders “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by using three anchoring symbols to relay a mood within a broad subject. Though the poem stands as an elegy for a specific person and a particular historical moment, the image-driven lyric takes the human response to tragedy and the outpouring of love into art as its true subject.

In the opening lines of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman uses a familiar poetic setting, but soon subverts the reader’s expectations. Like the Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “Lilacs” begins with lines that promise a pastoral, spring setting—the traditional location for romantic idyll or fantasy. But for Whitman, the “ever-returning spring” (Line 3) now reminds him of one spring: April of 1865 when he learned the painful news of Lincoln’s assassination. Throughout the poem, Whitman connects death and beauty, expansive joy and loss, isolation and inclusion.

At the poem’s publication, audiences would have recognized the timing in the same way contemporary audiences are apt to recognize a poem centering on the events of September 11th. The first canto—a section of a long poem—sets the parameters for elegy; the “trinity” (Canto 1, Line 4) spring brings back every year: the lilac, the western star, and “him,” which represents Lincoln. The poems uses repetition as both a theme—the return of seasons and memory, the cycles of life and death—and as a device with the literal repetition of words and phrases to create a meditative incantation within the poem.

After the first canto’s establishing context, Canto 2 releases an emotional lament, the repeated “O” in all five lines representing the speaker’s cry in lament and the visual circle of the letter’s shape. The speaker drops from the promise of lilacs blossoming to the “moody, tearful night” (Canto 2, Line 2) in which a “black murk” (Canto 2, Line 3) obscures the star from sight, leaving the speaker adrift and “helpless” (Canto 2, Line 4).

Each successive canto provides its own window of grief; each section can stand alone as a brief lyric or episode. Canto 3 returns to the dooryard—a threshold—filled with the flower “whose perfume strong I love” (Canto 3, Line 3). Canto 4 introduces the poem’s third major symbol, the thrush, singing “[d]eath’s outlet song of life” (Canto 4, Line 7). Whitman uses the flower, the star, and the bird at intervals throughout the poem: the perennial love and loss, the lost guiding light, and the song that carries everything—including death.

Cantos 5 and 6 follow a coffin’s journey, encompassing an American landscape in mourning. Canto 7 echoes Canto 2 in a moment of heightened lament and lyric incantation. In Canto 8, a more personal connection emerges between the speaker and the deceased—an imagined but intimate interaction in which the speaker experiences a connection to the star during a sleepless night of wandering. Images of the “rim of the west” (Canto 8, Line 7) and the “netherward black of the night” (Canto 8, Line 9) call up the distress of the nation before, during, and after the war, which culminated in Lincoln’s death. In Canto 9, the speaker identifies the “lustrous star” (Canto 9, Line 4) as his “departing comrade” (Canto 9, Line 5), who lingers in this world with unfinished business.

Cantos 10 and 11 pose a series of questions about how to mourn and how to go on, examining a list of images giving way to household and municipal settings—an expansive view of the country that spreads out in Canto 12. Canto 13 addresses the humble “gray-brown” (Canto 13, Line 1) bird who sings a “loud human song” (Canto 13, Line 5) which is the music that underscores the poem: the song of love, suffering, death, and ultimately, art.

Cantos 14, 15, and 16 build through stages of grief; Whitman reworked these sections, combining seven cantos into these final three. Canto 14 includes the bird’s “carol of death” (Canto 14, Line 21) to the speaker who appears to hover above houses, cities, farms, lakes, and forests. Less of a dirge than a celebration, the bird’s song represents the speaker’s turn toward hope.

The speaker receives the bird’s song in the 15th canto and describes a vision of the war dead; the vision ultimately resolves as a consoling image, one in which the soldiers “suffer’d not” (Canto 15, Line 19), though the people left behind—other armies, the mothers, wives, and children—continue to suffer.

In Canto 16, Whitman leaves his speaker in a middle space between death and life. Both buoyed up with joy and lowered by sadness, the speaker stops his song, though he retains the memory of it and “the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird” (Canto 16, Line 15). Returning to the three dominant images in the penultimate line of the poem, the speaker keeps the flower, the star, and the bird with him in remembrance of his friend and in harmony with the suffering and joy of being human.