impervious to decay because the facial features remained impressively
lifelike many days after the assassination. In fact, the face was regularly
made up by skilled cosmeticians to hide the ravages of death. Whitman
knew that when poor soldiers died, they were generally buried in military
cemeteries near the hospitals or in makeshift graves on the battle¤elds.
The slain sons of the well-to-do were often embalmed (an art perfected
during the war by skilled entrepreneurs) and shipped home in metal cas-
kets to be buried in a cemetery close to the family home. During the train
stops on its twelve-day journey, the president’s corpse lay in state in its
casket, the head propped on a pillow; and despite the best work of the
embalmer who accompanied the body on its journey to its burial at
Spring¤eld, Illinois, the face began to take on a “leaden” hue.^74 In this
most impressively structured poem of his career, Whitman took from his-
tory only those elements that served his artistic needs.
Such poems as “To Think of Time,” “This Compost,” and “Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking” show the persona testing the meaning of
mortality essentially in terms of his own death. But since “Lilacs” is a
national poem, the persona’s mourning must also exemplify the nation’s
confrontation with death. “Lilacs” con®ates his progress toward an ac-
commodation with death with his nation’s need for surcease and recon-
ciliation, so that the poem is designed, in Paul Zweig’s words, to serve as
a “soothing myth of death—an instrument of healing for the nation and
for himself.”^75 “Lilacs,” in fact, can be read as an exemplary history of one
man’s mourning, tracing the persona’s grief work from the emotional chill
when he ¤rst learns of the president’s slaying to his stupor and verbal
impotence, and thence to his “letting go” through his mystic immersion
in the mystery of death, and ¤nally his acceptance of death as a redemp-
tive force.^76 Intertwining personal and national grief, the poem culmi-
nates as the persona regains the prophetic voice that had been muted by
grief and his vision of a future prosperous America that the horrors of war
had obscured. War is sometimes viewed as a “blood rite” or a “collective
high”—a purgative experience that creates the feeling that a nation is
being redeemed and strengthened by the blood shed by its choicest young
men, an event whose aftermath is an (often deluded) sense of national
renewal and rebirth.^77 Emerson implies as much in his comment that
“one whole generation might consent to perish, if by their fall, political
liberty, a clean and just life could be made sure to the generations that
follow.”^78 And Lincoln enunciates a similar principle in his address at the
“Come Sweet Death!” / 193