songsters, heard at twilight in the dusky cedars; and with these
the evening star, which as many may remember, night after night
in the early part of that eventful spring, hung low in the west
with unusual and tender brightness. These are the premises
whence he starts his solemn chant.Burroughs and Whitman emphasize that death is the poem’s vital core,
declaring that “no other opportunity but a vast ensanguined war, and a
personal movement in it, like Walt Whitman’s, as consoler, con¤dant,
and most loving support to hundreds of wounded men, most of them
very young, could have drawn in that unprecedented manner on the soul
for sympathy and pity.” And a possible note of self-praise asserts that
Whitman’s “soul met these demands, and fully responded to them.” The
Burroughs/Whitman summary does much to clarify the poem’s meaning
and its artistry:
The [poem’s] attitude, therefore, is not that of being bowed
down, and weeping hopeless tears, but of singing a commemora-
tive hymn in which the voices of Nature join, and [the music] ¤ts
that exalted condition of the soul which serious events and the
presence of death induce. There are no words of mere eulogy, no
statistics, and no story or narrative, but there are pictures, proces-
sions, and a strange mingling of darkness and light, of grief and
triumph, now the voice of the bird, or the drooping lustrous star,
or the sombre thought of death, then a recurrence to the open
scenery of the land as it lay in the April light, “the summer ap-
proaching with richness and the ¤elds all busy with labor,” pres-
ently dashed in upon by a spectral vision of armies with torn and
bloody battle-®ags—and again of the white skeletons of young
men long afterward strewing the ground. Hence the piece has
little or nothing of the character of the usual productions on such
occasions. It is dramatic, yet there is no development of plot, but
a constant interplay, a turning and returning of images and senti-
ments.^66The emphasis on the musicality of the “Burial Hymn,” as “Lilacs” was
sometimes known, suggests its af¤nity to a tragic symphonic tone poem
insofar as any verbal art can approximate such music. Whitman’s elegy
190 / “Come Sweet Death!”