Whitmans Elegy: Repetition, Restraint and Reconciliation in

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd

Kaye Kagaoan
O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? laments the speaker of Walt
Whitmans 1865 poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd which, despite its historical
and literary acclaim as a pastoral elegy for Abraham Lincoln, makes no explicit mention of the fallen
president or his assassination. Whitmans abandonment of naming his subject is one of several
conventions of the pastoral elegy from which he departs; however, whereas other pastoral elegies of
comparable fame such as Miltons Lycidas or Shelleys Adonas are about other poets, the
subject of Lilacs is a major political figure whose death is embedded in the history of an entire
nation. M.K. Blasing writes, readings of Lilacs by analogy to music or to Lycidas or Adonas do
not explain the shape of the poem as a whole, because they do not take into account the nature and
implications of the history informing it Lincolns assassination. The challenge was at once
literary, national, and personal (Blasing 32). Whitmans struggle to express a personal mourning
over a public figure thus serves as the central tension in Lilacs, where he exercises a significant
amount of restraint over the language of the poem that contrasts the literary experimentation and
cacophony of his earlier Song of Myself. This poetic restraint, made manifest through the poems
complex structure and symbolism, cyclical and repetitive sounds and imagery, and departures from
the conventions of pastoral elegiac form, ultimately serves as the vehicle through which Whitman
articulates his grief and impresses his personal mark on an inextricably public elegy.
Despite its widespread consideration as a pastoral elegy, Lilacs exhibits a departure from
several conventions of the form, reinforcing the challenge of composing an elegy that
commemorates a public figure to which the poet feels a strong emotional connection, even though
there is no record of Whitman and Lincoln having ever met. Richard P. Adams condenses
Whitmans formal omissions into two main points:
The first is an avoidance of the literally pastoral element together with all reference
to classical mythology. The second is the elimination of any personal reference to the
speaker or the dead man that would tend to keep the poem from being about the
death of all men. Neither omission damages the fundamental structure or meaning of

the traditional elegy, and neither requires to be explained on the grounds of

ignorance. The first can be accounted to Whitmans bias in favor of the modern over
the ancient, and the second to his carefulness never to celebrate the individual at the
expense of the general. (Adams 480)
Whitman replaces the particularity of Lincoln and his death with the recurring symbols of the star
and lilacs, while lists of imagery depicting America replace references to classical mythology and the
representation of Nature as sharing in the universal sorrow (Norlin 297). Unlike the subjects of
Milton and Shelleys elegies, both of whom were close personal friends of the poets, Lincolns
significance resonates throughout America; therefore, the particularity of American imagery over
generic natural imagery is essential in the poems nationalistic spirit. To some extent, then,
Whitmans evasion of explicitly referring to Lincoln and his death acts as a sombre foreshadowing
that the speakers mourning may never truly reach a point of personal reconciliation.
In the poems first section, Whitmans repetition of sounds and his introduction to two of
the poems three recurring symbols not only introduce the speakers mourning but also, in particular,
the recurring nature of this mourning. Though Whitmans process of writing Lilacs began almost
immediately after [Lincolns] assassination and was completed within weeks (French), the poems
vague temporal setting simultaneously recalls both present and future recurrences of mourning:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomd,
And the great star early droopd in the western sky in the night,
I mournd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love. (Whitman 459)
The repetition of ever returning spring in these first stanzas characterises spring not as a
primary symbol of new life, but as a trigger that revives the speakers grief over him I love, the
drooping star in the west that stands for the long-passed Lincoln. The repetition of ever
returning spring, along with the juxtaposition of great star and drooping star within this
opening section, suggests the cyclical nature of this mourning. Adams, along with many other critics,
identifies the star symbol as Venus, the evening and also the morning star (Adams 481).
Furthermore, the internal rhyme of bloom and droop, as well as the repetition of the suffix ing
replace the lyrical end rhyme of traditional elegies with a subtler and more delicate kind of rhyme
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that functions to emphasise the formality and artificiality of this poetic patterning, which is
designed to cover up the rupture of time by establishing a natural continuity (Blasing 33).
Throughout the poem, the morning star reminds the speaker of his past and present
mourning; yet the arrival of spring also revives a widespread mourning that extends past the
individual speaker, as the fifth and sixth sections of the poem recall Lincolns funeral procession:
5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peepd from the ground,
spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the yellow-speard wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown
fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
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Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloopd flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veild 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 pourd around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organswhere amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac. (Whitman 460)
These sections, which trace the procession of Lincolns coffin throughout America, feature an
interpolation between two conventions of the pastoral elegy: the refrain and All Nature Mourns
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(Norlin 297). The anaphora of the words Amid, Passing, and With the echo Whitmans
portrayals of various aspects of America in Song of Myself and depict a nation unified under the
same grief; although the content of these lines do not directly function as a refrain in the poem, the
repetition of anaphora in sections of the poem that depict America as a whole replaces the natural
mourning with national mourning. That is to say, whereas traditional pastoral elegies contain the
sympathetic mourning of nature (Adams 479), Lincolns mourners in Lilacs are the millions of
Americans who lead varied ways of life but share the same grief. The repetition of coffin, faces,
voices, and dirges across several lines creates a visual path that traces the funeral procession as it
crosses the masses who share in the speakers own mourning. Whitman also uses the present
progressive verb tense in these sections, acknowledging that the memory of this funeral procession
recurs not only within himself but also across America. Thus, the intimacy of the poems opening
lines is slightly misleading: although the speaker projects a personal sentiment towards the star, it
remains to be publicly visible, just as Lincoln was a publicly known and loved figure. Though the last
two lines of the sixth section return to the speaker as he privately offers his sprig of lilac, the speaker
and Whitman must concede to the truth that his mourning is not merely his own but that of an
entire nation.
Since the speaker never addresses the specific subject of the elegy, the poem takes an
inevitable turn from the particularity of an individuals death to the concept of death in general; the
seventh section of Lilacs acts as the poems turning point, as the speaker shifts his discourse from
Lincolns death to the death of any American. Under the context of the Civil War, Lilacs then
evolves into Whitmans lamentation for the fallen soldiers who sacrificed their lives in order to
realise Lincolns vision. However, as Desire Henderson writes, [Lincolns] particularity continues
to erupt into the text No other victim of [the Civil War] was granted the elaborate funeral rites
that met Lincolns corpse (Henderson 120). By omitting any specific mention of Lincoln in the
poem, other victims of the Civil War are offered the opportunity of being the subject of Whitmans
elegy. Just as the speaker describes giving a sprig of lilac to the Lincolns publicly circulating coffin,
he rescinds the intimacy of his act in a striking parenthetical aside: Nor for you, for one alone, /
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring (Whitman 461). The speaker then extends his
mourning to all coffins, further expanding the subject of his elegy from the individual Lincoln
whose name is never mentioned in the poem to an elegy for the deaths of other Americans and
death itself.

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Indeed, Whitmans response to the challenge of such an elegy demands an inclusion of the
general, and the knowledge of death that the speaker encounters towards the end of the poem (i.e.
section 15) features visions not of Lincoln but of the unburied many who died in war. In the tenth
and eleventh sections, the speaker contemplates how he would decorate Lincolns grave:
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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?
Sea-winds blown from east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the
prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
Ill perfume the grave of him I love.
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O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love? (Whitman 462).
At this point in the poem, the speaker has returned to talking about Lincoln, yet the growing
vagueness of the phrase him I love has stretched in meaning to more than a single entity. In the
tenth section, Whitman presents the speakers central predicament; however, beyond the challenge
of expressing his personal mourning for Lincoln lies that of also mourning for other Americans who
have died. Thus he cannot simply perfume or decorate the grave with the personal symbol of the
lilac, but must instead include the winds and breaths of all of America along with his own. The
speaker also fantasises decorations of natural, domestic, and urban imagery that spans a diverse
range of American ways of life:
Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray
smoke lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent,
sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,
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With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green
leaves of the trees prolific,
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river,
with a wind-dapple here and there,
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against
the sky, and shadows,
And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of
chimneys,
And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the
workmen homeward returning. (Whitman 462)
The speaker continues onto the twelfth section of the poem, listing images in a free-flowing way that
mimics the fifth and sixth sections as well as Song of Myself. In these sections Whitman
juxtaposes mourning with celebration, as an elegy typically interweaves the two concepts; however,
by speaking for both Lincoln and America in general, Whitman offers the nations scenes of life
not only to a single president, but also to the masses whose death allowed the nations sprawling life
and beauty to become a reality. Despite this, it is worth noting that the speaker not only evades any
mention of Lincoln or how he died but also never describes the specific scene of Lincolns burial: it
is the endlessly deferred action of the poem while the poem opens with the news of Lincolns
death and follows a coffin towards a destination, that destination is never reached (Henderson
121). The cyclical and recurring state of individual and national mourning in Lilacs stems in part
from Whitmans omission of Lincolns burial scene; therefore, the masses of nameless dead
Americans share in the recurring state of mourning given to Lincoln.
This broadening of the poems subject from Lincoln to the nation also justifies Whitmans
omission of an arguably essential convention of the pastoral elegy: its subject masquerades as a
herdsman moving amid rustic scenes (Norlin 295). According to George Norlins Conventions of
the Pastoral Elegy, the collective mourning of nature in the pastoral elegiac tradition results from
the loss of this figure, and the beasts of field and forest also show their grief, especially the herds
and flocks now left to roam without a shepherd (Norlin 301). This characteristic of the pastoral
elegy would have suited Lilacs, had Whitman specifically mentioned Lincoln as the subject of the
poem; however, since this is evidently not the case, the image of nature mourning the loss of its
herdsman simply does not fit into the greater context of the poem. For example, Whitman depicts
not only rustic scenes but also more urban ones in order to capture the diversity of America and its
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mourning citizens, as seen in the funeral procession in the fifth and sixth sections. Since the poem
equates or at least attempts to equate Lincolns death with that of the nameless deceased
American, this convention of the pastoral elegy would have been counterintuitive to the greater
discussions of death that take place in the poem.
Although he incorporates the generic and the national in these lists of images, Whitman
impresses his personal mourning in Lilacs through the three symbols that dominate and
interweave throughout the poem. Whitman strikes a balance between individual and collective grief
by exercising restraint in the poems structure such that the lists of imagery that includes national
and generic mourning do not interfere with his own mourning over the loss of Lincoln. In his
commentary essay on Lilacs, R.W. French points out that while the lilac, the hermit thrush, and
the aforementioned star accumulate meaning as the poem develops (French), their contextual
significance in the poem leads directly to Whitman. The lilac and the star, as well as their temporal
appearance in the spring, are not inherently symbols of mourning; however, they gain new symbolic
meaning through Whitman, who places them in the context of his personal grief, thus transforming
the otherwise positive connotations of these common and public symbols. Furthermore, Whitman
uses April, the month of Lincolns assassination, to turn spring into a season of grief: Both lilacs
and western star gain their meaning from the temporal context of mourning. They are placed within
the dramatic framework of elegy so that the Poet can manipulate them as signs of grief (Steele 11).
The symbolic meaning of the lilacs and star are personal to the speaker, even though the
mourning depicted in the poem is both personal and national; since Whitman evades any explicit
mention of Lincoln and his death, these symbols act as a translation of his personal mourning.
Whitman portrays the lilacs, star, and memory of Lincolns death as a trinity in the second stanza
that triggers the speakers mourning with the coming of the ever-returning spring. The third and
eighth sections of the poem illustrate the speakers personal relationship with the lilacs and star,
respectively:
In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-washd palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracleand from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-colord blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break. (Whitman 459)

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In the third section, arguably the only section that overtly depicts a pastoral scene, the speaker
describes the lilac bush, whose flowers trigger an immediate symbolism of love. The repetition of
the heart-shaped leaves of rich green and description of blossoms as delicate suggest that the
speaker feels a close, personal connection if not a romantic one towards his subject. At the end
of this section, the speaker breaks off a sprig and flower, wherein the violence done to the lilac
takes us back to the violence done to Lincoln (Blasing 33). Whitman likens Lincolns assassination,
which he views as an interruption of the natural course of nature, with the breaking off of the sprig,
which is a destruction of the natural miracle of the lilac bush. However, this gesture takes place
within the speakers private space, implying that his metaphorical interpretation of Lincolns death
carries a personal, private significance that exists solely between the speaker and his subject. The
presence of lilacs in the poem as a whole is confined to scenes depicting either the speaker in his
private space, or when the speaker comes into contact with his subject (i.e. when he gives the coffin
his sprig of lilac in the sixth section). In the seventh section, the speaker adorns death and coffins
all with flowers and branches, yet only his specific love receives the lilacs.
The temporal setting is vague within the context of the speakers mourning; that is to say,
one cannot easily discern whether the speaker breaks off the sprig during the year of the death or
every year when lilacs bloom in the spring. The same can be said for the eighth section, when the
speaker contemplates his personal connection to the star:
O western orb sailing the heaven,
Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walkd,
As I walkd in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,
As you droopd from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other stars all
lookd on,)
As we wanderd together the solemn night, (for something I know not what kept
me from sleep,)
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe,
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
As I watchd where you passd and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone. (Whitman 461)

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Unlike the image of the lilac bush, which suggests an intimate relationship between the speaker and
his subject, the star depicts a more distant relationship between them that parallels Whitmans
admiration and reverence over Lincoln, whom he never met in person. The speaker appears to be in
communication with the orb in his apostrophe, and at times even addresses them together as
opposed to existing separately and never truly meeting. The phrase, Now I know what you must
have meant implies how, although the star is distant and therefore unattainable, the speaker feels a
supernatural connection to it, as if the star, from a distance, acts as his friend and possible mentor.
Through these interactions between the speaker and the symbols of lilacs and star, Whitman
attempts to convey his personal connection to Lincoln and justify his desire to express his personal
mourning amid the more public historical context of Lincolns death.
As with the third section, it is unclear whether the now of the eighth section is
instantaneous rather than recurring, since both the lilacs and the star return annually as part of the
spring trinity alongside the memory of Lincolns death. Whitmans use of anaphora through the
repetition of With in the third and As in the eighth and the recurrence of the internal
rhyme of droopd and lookd in the latter section function as a likely continuation of Blasings
proposed natural continuity in the first two stanzas. Still, these scenes appear to be temporally
suspended in the vague narrative trajectory of the poem; however, since the scenes in the third and
eighth sections do not use the present progressive verb tense that implies recurring action in other
sections of Lilacs, it is likely that these scenes are part of Whitmans loose interpretation of an
elegiac narrative arc that traces the speakers transition from mourning to possible reconciliation
with the death of his subject.
Though the hermit thrush is the last of the three main symbols to be introduced in Lilacs,
this bird acts as a double to both Whitman and the speaker, especially in the last four sections of the
poem. The fourth section of Lilacs introduces the hermit thrush as a solitary creature, much like
the poems speaker, who feels an irresistible urge to sing its song of the bleeding throat:
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

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Song of the bleeding throat,

Deaths outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou wouldst surely die.)
(Whitman 459-460)
Like the thrush, the speaker has his own song to mourn for his loved one, and, more specifically,
Whitman has his own song for Lincoln in the form of this elegy, yet the public spectacle
surrounding his death keeps the speaker from adequately expressing his own personal mourning. In
this introduction to the thrush, Whitman uses repetition of the words song and sing, as well as
several words that emphasise the isolation it requires in order to deliver this song such as
secluded, solitary, withdrawn, and by himself in nearly every line of this section. The
repeated mentions of the thrushs song emphasise the speakers desire to compose and perform his
own song, while the seclusion of the thrush allows its voice to be heard. In the thirteenth section,
the speaker expresses his desire to hear the thrushs song, yet he struggles to do so in the presence
of the lilac and star: You only I hear yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,) / Yet the lilac
with the mastering odor holds me (Whitman 463). Therefore, the speaker who addresses the
thrush as his dear brother must perform his own version of deaths outlet song for life under
similar solitary conditions in order to do so.
In the last three sections of Lilacs, the speaker finally approaches the solitude of the
swamp, away from the noise and public spectacle of processions and collective mourning, and
listens to the thrush as Whitmans elegy builds towards the climax of the thrushs song in section 14.
While the first thirteen sections of the poem are fragmented in structure and display no clear linear
progression, the last three more clearly resemble a linear narrative arc. This overall organisation of
the poems sixteen sections depicts the speakers transition from the fragmentation of mourning
towards some semblance of reconciliation or healing: only when he reaches the swamp does the
speaker not only gain a full appreciation of the thrushs song, but also come to some form of
reconciliation with death while experiencing this song. Still, despite the speakers arrival at the
swamp and his new epiphanies about death, he appears to exercise some restraint in fully submitting
himself to the birds song:
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
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Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receivd me,
The gray-brown bird I know receivd us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird. (Whitman 464)
Whitman introduces the thrushs song with three 3-line stanzas that convey a similar meaning, as if
to evoke a sense of hesitation over allowing himself to be consumed by the thrushs carol, wherein it
expresses an open acceptance of death; this hesitation may suggest some fear within the speaker that
a reconciliation with death will end the annual recurrence of mourning that he feels towards the
poems subject. However, unlike the burial scene that is always implied yet never reached in this
poem, the thrushs song is not withheld from the reader. In Blasings words:
The birds carol, tallied by the poets soul, is distinctive, for it is the most regular
poetry in Lilacs. When the poet translates the purely natural notes of the bird, he
produces the most conventional and literary passage in the poem. Divided into
four-line stanzas, the song makes use of repetition, contains some end rhymes and
many internal rhymes, and concludes with an elegiac hexameter line: I float this
carol with joy, with joy to thee O death. In contrast to the earlier historical-narrative
sentences, the carol transpires in the eternal present of the lyric. (Blasing 35)
Therefore, in further contrast to the fragmentation that comprises most of Lilacs to structurally
illustrate the speakers mourning, the birds welcoming attitude towards death translates into the
conventional poetic structure of its song.
However, despite hearing the thrushs song and claiming to have gained a new knowledge of
death, the stanzas that follow the song do not suggest a typical elegiac reconciliatory moment with
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death for the speaker. Though surrounded by nature, the song of the thrush subjects him to visions
of violence and war imagery:
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they sufferd not,
The living remaind and sufferd, the mother sufferd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade sufferd,
And the armies that remaind sufferd. (Whitman 466)
As with the inevitable merging of the personal and national that comes with Whitmans mourning
over a public figure, the speakers visions during the thrushs song depict myriads rather than a
single individual. Max Cavitch argues that this imagery suggests not only the achievement of
memorial piety but also the improved sociability that begins with the recognition of the grievances
of the living the word sufferd becomes a kind of refrain, chanting the persistence of disruption,
even as the poet anticipates his withdrawal from this scene of vigilant mourning (Cavitch 276).
These visions of myriads suggest that eulogising a public figure such as Lincoln must also involve
eulogising those who died in support of his cause, hence this poems transition from the personal to
the public, and then, by the end of the poem, back to the personal. Only after the speaker regards
the myriad as much as the individual dead does he truly attain his reconciliatory moment, wherein he
accepts that his new knowledge of death does not mean that his mourning will end, since the public
and national mourning over both Lincoln and the myriads of American soldiers will continue
among those living around him.
By the end of the poem, one can observe how, despite its departures from several pastoral
elegiac conventions and structural similarities to Song of Myself, Whitman exhibits an immensely
superior level of control over the language in Lilacs. Whitmans elegy begins with fragmentation
and mends itself albeit bleakly in the final section by mirroring the speakers acceptance of the
nature of mourning with an interconnection of the poems three central symbols:
Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
Victorious song, deaths outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
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As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.
I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arousd in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I
loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and landsand this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim. (Whitman 466-467)
Not only does this final section revisit the present progressive tense of previous sections, but it also,
more specifically, echoes the coffins path in the fifth sections funeral progression through the
anaphora of Passing in the first section. This return to the present progressive tense suggests
that the mourning will continue its cyclical recurrence in the coming of spring. As the speaker
recounts his retrievements out of the night, Whitman unites the three symbols that pervade his
poem in the line, Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul. Rather than describing
these symbols as twining to suggest a recurring interpolation among these three symbols, they are
simply twined, thus implying that when the speaker is reminded of his mourning in the future, his
approach to this mourning will be slightly different from before, given the new knowledge that he
has now attained. Whitmans rejection of many pastoral elegiac conventions is therefore justified as

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his means of solving his dilemma of composing a personal elegy for a public figure: The solution
of the Lincoln elegy, then, was the dissolution of form (Blasing 32).

Works Cited
Adams, Richard P. "Whitman's "Lilacs and the Tradition of Pastoral Elegy." Modern Language
Association. 72.3 (1957): 479-487. Web. 4 Mar 2014.
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. "Whitman's "Lilacs" and the Grammars of Time." PMLA. 97.1 (1982): 3139.
Cavitch, Max. American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 244-285.
French, R.W.. "'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' [1865]." The Walt Whitman Encyclopedia.
The Walt Whitman Archive, n.d. Web. 4 Mar 2014.
Henderson, Desire. "Lincoln's Unrest: Walt Whitman and the Civil War Cemetery." Trans.
Array Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 117-125. Web.
9 Mar 2014.
Norlin, George. "The Conventions of the Pastoral Elegy."American Journal of Philology. 32.3 (1911):
294-312.
Steele, Jeffrey. "Poetic Grief-Work in Whitman's "Lilacs"."Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 2.3 (1984):
10-16. Web. 9 Mar 2014.
Whitman, Walt. "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and
Collected Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1982. 459-467.

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