dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery when he praises the
silent Union dead “who gave their lives that the nation might live.” Al-
though Whitman consistently criticized the war for its irrational slaugh-
ter of young men on the battle¤elds and in the hospitals, he designed
“Lilacs” as a palliative and conciliatory document, and as such only one
of its sixteen sections describes the terrifying carnage that characterized
the war. The war’s end had nurtured a desire for national reconciliation
and national unity, for a new morality, and for an industrialized democ-
racy inspired by a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood. “Lilacs” post-
pones describing the horrors of the war that so upset Whitman to its
penultimate section, where the persona views them “askant”—out of the
corner of his eye, as it were. The poem blunts the chaos and terror of the
war by focusing on one archetypal death, on one personi¤cation of grief
work, and on the awesomeness of death itself.
In the poem’s celebrated opening lines, April ushers in a symbolic
“trinity” of death and renewal—the return of the planet Venus, the re-
appearance of the lilacs, and the recurring memory of the beloved presi-
dent. The rocking rhythm, the repetitions, and the short breath units in
the opening lines mimic a religious chant—a common feature in elegiac
poems:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and 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.The distraught persona’s staccato outcries in the poem’s second stanza
re®ect the intensity of his grief and his sense of personal loss.^79 For as
Jacques Derrida says, “we cannot discuss mourning without taking part
in [se faire part de] death, and ¤rst of all one’s own death”; it is not only
Lincoln but what Derrida calls “the him in me” that Whitman mourns.
Henry Staten af¤rms that “what motivates the classical project of tran-
scendence of mourning at the deepest level is the fear not of the loss of
object but the loss of self.”^80 Thus the persona’s grief work begins with his
admission that his grief for the dead (and ultimately for himself) has
rendered him impotent:
194 / “Come Sweet Death!”