All over bouquets of roses,
O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the ¤rst,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the cof¤ns all of you O Death.)In a well known poem, Theodore Roethke apologizes for daring to
eulogize his dead student with the lines, “I, with no rights in this matter, /
Neither father nor lover.”^86 One might also question by what “rights”
Whitman dared to become Lincoln’s self-appointed elegist, since he was
neither a friend nor a colleague of the president, and with whom he is not
known to have exchanged a single word. Of course, he had admired Lin-
coln from afar and was generally favorable toward him in his dispatches
to the New York Times; later, in Specimen Days, he claimed that as the
president rode through the streets he recognized and acknowledged Whit-
man.^87 But the fantasy world of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d,” where reality and “dreams’ projections” coalesce, is not gov-
erned by historicity or even by probability. And so, by an amazing act of
the creative imagination, Whitman dispels the appearance of having in-
truded on the solemn observances by inventing a mythic encounter (in
section 8 of the poem) in which the persona’s spirit and the spirit of the
still-living president silently commune throughout one magic night a
month prior to Lincoln’s assassination. In this scenario the intuitive per-
sona observes the brilliant “western star” as it is “sailing the heavens”
above his Long Island “dooryard.” He identi¤es the star as the personi-
¤cation of Lincoln’s prescient spirit, mystically aware of its impending
tragic fate and signaling its gloomy forebodings to the persona who, as
is evident in many poems, is adept at reading natural and supernatural
signs. In this elaborate dramatization of the pathetic fallacy, the persona
beholds the portentous star shining sadly, its beams directed at him. Of
all the mortals to whom the brilliant Lincoln star might have appeared,
it chooses to commune its fatal augury to the Whitman persona, seem-
ingly bending down to him to impart its runic secret, while the other
stars, like so many mourners, look on in wonderment. During this en-
chanted meeting the persona “stood on the rising ground in the breeze in
the cool, transparent night”—his trans¤gured night—and received a pre-
monitory intimation of the April 15 assassination. What better “rights,”
“Come Sweet Death!” / 197