This dust was once the man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of these States.^71This praise resembles Emerson’s estimation of Lincoln as “a plain man of
the people... a man without vice... a miracle of Providence,” which
had designated him as the unique leader for his times.^72 As a poet who
identi¤ed the spirit of the war with the spirit of democracy, Whitman
could not memorialize Lincoln as though he were an aristocratic person-
age; Lincoln must somehow represent all the war’s dead. “When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” identi¤es him only as the ¤gure in the
draped cof¤n, as the “Western fallen star,” and as “the “wisest, sweetest
soul of all my days and lands” to whose “dear sake” the poem is dedicated.
The Lincoln of Whitman’s poem is an abstract national hero, the ¤rst
among equals, representative of the legion of the dead who were felled
in a sacred war that the poem never names—a war without geography
or historical details or place names, as though its locus were the poet’s
own “dreams’ projections.” It identi¤es none of the cities where Lincoln’s
funeral train stopped on its 1,662-mile roundabout journey across the
Northern states. Nor does it describe the magni¤cent presidential rail-
road carriage, which had been converted to a funeral car in which the
embalmed body in its magni¤cent cof¤n lay in state on a catafalque
and was exhibited before an estimated one million mourners in a quasi-
political effort to solidify support for the Union.^73 Nor does the “Burial
Poem” ever mention the interment of the hero-president—a standard
feature in the elegy. We can only hypothesize that the president’s burial
on May 4, 1865, may have coincided with that mystic moment in section
14 of the poem when the poet’s spirit intones its incomparable tribute to
death.
Like the “ample, brownish, woolen blanket” that covers the dead in
some of the Drum-Taps poems, the poem’s unidenti¤ed “cof¤n carrying
a corpse to where it shall rest in its grave” is also a pall of anonymity and
serves as a symbol of all the war’s unknown dead. Whitman never de-
scribes the president’s body, even though huge crowds in major popula-
tion centers viewed the embalmed and cosmeticized corpse, dressed in a
frock coat and white shirt, as it lay in state in its ornate black metal casket.
Many susceptible viewers even assumed that the body was preternaturally
192 / “Come Sweet Death!”