Walt Whitman-When Lilacs Last...

In Walt Whitman’s When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d, we enjoin with a speaker who is mourning the loss of a “star” he loved. Of course, the speaker is Whitman and the “drooping star” he mourns is President Abraham Lincoln who was killed by an assassin. In the poem, Whitman uses many poetic devices with symbolism being chief among them. This analysis will explicate all sixteen stanzas of Whitman’s poem, paying particular attention to the three main symbols he uses throughout the poem as a way of adding continuity and cohesion: Lilac; Star; Thrush.

In the first stanza of Whitman’s poem we see the use of the lilac and the star to symbolize eternal recurrence of life and Abraham Lincoln respectively. The poem begins by telling us that even as the lilacs bloom perennially, the “great star” in the western sky droops. The star that has fallen is Lincoln and the speaker argues he will mourn with the return of each spring, because even though nature is reborn (as the lilacs symbolize), he suffers from grief over the loss of “him I love.” Nature holds the promise of eternal life in the sense that each spring life blooms anew, as lilacs bloom perennially and as new men are born even though others die. However, this promise of “trinity” which springs recurrence brings is still not enough to take away the sadness when someone loses one they greatly love, “I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-ret

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ation for his journey. However, he resists singing the song of the thrush because he does not want to accept death and become soothed by it just yet. He still desires staying behind and mourning the loss and feeling that pain that come from such a lustrous star being extinguished, even though he understands the goal will be to accept death and sing anyway, like the thrush represents, “I hear your notes, I hear your call,/I hear, I come presently, I understand you,/But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d me,/The star my departing comrade holds and detains me” (Whitman 267). Stanzas ten and eleven are mirror stanzas of each other in the sense that they question how one can pay tribute best to such a great fallen star. In stanza ten the speaker asks what kind of song can he sing, and what choice of words could he use to ever pay tribute to one who has died that had such a large soul, “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?/And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?” (Whitman 267). As it turns out, the winds of nature from east to west and the wind of the speaker’s speech is all that can be used to perfume
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2769
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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