decades ago: “No great man has ever wept in a nobler elegy, all the nobler
because it has in it so much more than the death of one man, as much
indeed of nature as of man, as much of life as of death.”^64 Of the vast
poetic outpouring of grief that followed the assassination of President
Lincoln only “Lilacs” has sustained the dual status of a popular favorite
and an artistic classic. Neither Bryant’s “The Death of Lincoln” (in which
God takes Lincoln to his bosom) nor Melville’s “The Martyr” (“For they
killed him in his kindness, / And their madness and their blindness, /
And his blood is on their hand”) nor even James Russell Lowell’s impres-
sive “Ode Recited at the Commencement to the Living and Dead Sol-
diers of Harvard University” combines the scope, the sweep of personal
and national anguish, the powerful myth making, and the consummate
artistry of “Lilacs.” No other poetic commemoration of the war so exalt-
edly embraces the mystery of death, both in terms of national tragedy and
as a record of one man’s progression through despair, mourning, and a
resolution of his own and his nation’s anguish.
Probably the closest approach to Whitman’s intention in “Lilacs” at
the time he completed the poem is afforded by John Burroughs’s Notes
on Walt Whitman (1867), parts of which were actually written by Whit-
man, and whose whole manuscript was overseen by him.^65 The statement
stresses the poem’s pictorial brilliance, its underlying musicality, and its
focus on “the central thought of death.”
The main effort of the poem is of strong solemn and varied
music; and it involves in its construction a principle after which
perhaps the great composers must work—namely, spiritual auricu-
lar analogy. At ¤rst it would seem to defy analysis, so rapt is it
and so indirect. No reference whatever is made of the mere facts
of Lincoln’s death; the poet does not even dwell upon its unpro-
voked atrocity, and only occasionally is the tone that of lamenta-
tion; but, with the intuitions of the great art, which is the most
complex when it seems the most simple, he seizes upon three
beautiful facts of Nature, which he weaves into a wreath for the
dead President’s tomb. The central thought is of death, but around
this he curiously twines, ¤rst the early blooming lilacs which the
poet may have plucked the day the dark shadows came; next the
song of the hermit thrush, the most sweet and solemn of all our“Come Sweet Death!” / 189