then, could any poet claim for undertaking such an elegy than to have
communed spirit to spirit with the ill-fated president? The persona’s
night-long mystic vigil ends as he sadly contemplates the grieving star-
spirit descending its western course toward the realm of death:
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how
full you were of woe,
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool
transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward
black of the night,
As my soul in its trouble dissatis¤ed sank, as where you sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.Although the Lincoln star’s “netherward” course carries it into the re-
gions of blackness and death, we must remember that “the western orb
sailing the heavens” also symbolizes the interplay of death and life, for
Whitman identi¤es it as the “ever-renewing star” that gleams boldly each
springtime, the Venus-star, the star that the Greek elegist Bion desig-
nated the symbol of life and of nature’s rebirth.^88
As Jeffrey Steele observes, “Whitman portrays poetic grief work as a
progressive recovery of artistic control. By shrinking his grief to a man-
ageable moment in time, the poet begins the dedication of his poetry to
the process of mourning. The shift is facilitated by the ritual offering of
poetic images to death.”^89 So, in the next stage of his grief work, and in
conformity with the conventions of the classical elegy, the persona pro-
ceeds to decorate the president’s tomb. The pictures that he proposes
to “hang on the walls, / To adorn the burial-house of him I love” (sec-
tions 10–12) represent his visions of a postwar America blessed with peace
and plenty. Everywhere lush nature is pictured putting forth plants and
grasses. There are pictures of prosperous farms and populous cities, and
of workmen wending their way homeward from workshops and from fac-
tories with their “stacks of chimneys.” These idealized images soften the
harsh reality of the rapidly industrializing American landscape; thus, as
Leo Marx observes, paying “the most direct, wholehearted tribute to this
industrialized version of the pastoral ideal.”^90 One picture that the poet
bestows depicts the sun, the symbol of material and spiritual plenitude,
198 / “Come Sweet Death!”