of passage.^84 The poem’s train moves across ¤elds where violets spot “the
gray debris.” Violets are cheering indicators of springtime renewal, but
the “debris” from which they grow has a tragic connotation. (Section 15
of “Lilacs” speaks of “the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the
war”; and “Ashes of Soldiers” identi¤es debris with the bodies of the dead
soldiers.) The train passes blossoming trees and “endless grass” and ¤elds
of “the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-
brown ¤eld uprises”—all saluting the martyr-chief with the earth’s bril-
liant display of seasonal rebirth. The striking image of the saluting wheat
is reminiscent of Whitman’s wheat-resurrection imagery in “This Com-
post” and also invites comparison with Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because
I Could Not Stop for Death” in which the “gazing grain,” in a bold re-
versal of the normal subject-object relationship, appears to be saluting the
passing dead.
The Lincoln funeral train stopped in Northern cities, where vast crowds
viewed the president’s body as it lay in state. They expressed their grief
for the fallen chief through torchlight processions, oratory, hymns, and
tolling bells. In the popular mind the body had assumed the status of an
icon, both as the man who had saved the Union and as a representative
corpse of the war’s fallen soldiers. The rituals and ceremonies surround-
ing Lincoln’s cof¤n served to keep alive the mourning nation’s affection-
ate relationship to the departed president, for funerals, as Thomas Lynch
says, “are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and
the death that matters.”^85 By decking the deceased president’s cof¤n with
armloads of roses and lilacs—nourished perhaps by the compost of the
dead—the persona observes a convention the of the classical elegy. (In
“Lycidas” John Milton names a dozen ®owers that mourners should bring
to the tomb of the dead scholar.) But the persona’s internalized tribute
(his innermost thoughts are set off by parentheses) makes clear that this
symbolic gesture is intended to honor not Lincoln alone but, symboli-
cally, to decorate the graves of “all of you”—all the known and unknown
dead soldiers wherever they may be buried. The ®owers are also a tribu-
tary offering to Death itself:
(Not for you, for one alone,
Blossoms and branches green to cof¤ns all I bring,
For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant this song for you
O sane and sacred death.196 / “Come Sweet Death!”