O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.The lilac, thrush, and planet (or star) motifs are repeated, with varia-
tions, throughout the poem as affecting symbols of death and renewal.
The perfumed and “miraculous” lilac bush, “with heart-shaped leaves of
rich green” may indeed have been blooming in April 1865 on the Long
Island farm where the poet was born. The persona’s anguish and his sense
of personal loss may be represented by his breaking off a “sprig” of the
lilac bush—an act that has been represented as “a castrative act of mourn-
ing.”^81 This sprig of deciduous lilac, symbolic of eternal renewal, may be
included in the mass of ®owers that the persona will bring, “with loaded
arms,” to decorate the graves of the war dead (section 7). The hermit
thrush, said to be singing in praise of death in its “secluded recesses,” is
another symbol of hope and resurrection—an icon that was often etched
into the gravestones of New England cemeteries, and, like the butter®y
that adorns the opening and closing pages of the 1860 edition of Leaves
of Grass, a representation of the ®ight of the soul after death.^82 Like the
poem’s persona who keeps to himself in order to work out his private
grief, the bird—his alter ego, his “brother,” an aspect of his “I am”—is
pictured as “shy and hidden,” “withdrawn to himself,” while it secretly
rehearses its hymn in praise of death. In choosing the thrush to represent
the voice of nature and to echo his own voice, Whitman selected the
bird whose song has been recognized as “the most beautiful bird song in
America.”^83 The song of the thrush embodies the allure that death has
always had for the persona, who interprets it as the “[s]ong of the bleed-
ing throat, / Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know, / If
thou was not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)” And “the black
murk that hides the star” represents the pall of personal and national grief
that has temporarily obscured the star, which the persona identi¤es with
the spirit of the president and with which, in section 8 of the poem, he
holds communion.
Sections 5 through 7 of “Lilacs” picture the Lincoln funeral train on its
circuitous journey across a springtime landscape replete with images that
represent both death and renewal. For the poet and for the grieving na-
tion, the progress of the train across the face of the land constituted a rite
“Come Sweet Death!” / 195