The lines are intended to assuage the nation’s pain; but Whitman may
have been too deeply immersed in his terrible memories of the war to
temper his message with the overt promise of an afterlife.
In section 16, which concludes the poem, the persona emerges from his
dream state. Like the dreamer-persona of “The Sleepers,” he “passes”
from the mystic night of his dreamworld into the daylight world of wak-
ing consciousness, but he preserves his memories and his dreams—his
ghostly “retrievements out of the night.” Though he is still traumatized
by his clinging memories, his waking marks the completion of his for-
mal mourning for the “lustrous” president and the fallen soldiers. As the
war’s poet, he dedicates himself to preserve these “retrievements” in his
memory and, through his writings, to secure them in his nation’s memory.
The poem ends on a tragic-wistful note. The “echo arous’d in my soul” by
the song of the thrush still resonates in his mind, but now it produces
apprehension as well as calm. As the lilac, the star, and his swamp com-
panions once more appear before him, he pays a ¤nal tribute to “the
sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands” for whose “dear sake” he
has composed this poem.
The end of the Civil War marked the close of an era. And although
Whitman may not have intended it that way, “ When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d” serves as an elegy for the bygone days that had in-
spired the poet—in the ¤rst three editions of Leaves of Grass—to create
a luminous vision of hope for the American people, articulated by and
embodied in the persona of the quenchless, democratic Whitman per-
sona. Coincidentally, only a few months after Whitman completed his
great elegy, John Greenleaf Whittier published “Snow-Bound,” the era’s
most popular poem of wistful longing for a vanished world of American
innocence. At the conclusion of “ When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d” the persona is alone, recapitulating his bittersweet memories of
Lincoln and of “the dead I loved so well.” Henceforth, death would be-
come the most important subject of Whitman’s poetry, often focused in-
ward as he contemplated the imminence of his own dying. The more
important of his later poems, such as “Prayer of Columbus” and “Passage
to India,” are elegies to himself as he prepares for his ¤nal spirit-journey
to the unknown realm that may lie beyond mortality.
“Come Sweet Death!” / 205