When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom D Analysis

Walt Whitman wrote a poem in honor of Abraham Lincoln titled, When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d. Although the poem never actually says who its about you can tell from the pleather of references allow you to see who Whitman is talking about. Whitman speaks of the sadness that he and the entire generation of American’s will carry with them each year as they are reminded of the assassination of the man who planned to reunite the nation with the “malice towards none and charity for all”. Deemed one of the finest poems Whitman has ever written. Whitman admired and defended President Lincoln with every fiber of his being. His poem was said to take you on a roller coaster of emotions from extreme grief from loss to regret of no chance for reconciliation. It has been deemed almost theatric with its dramatization of emotion. Nonetheless it went on to touch many with its ability to overwhelm people with their emotions by contributing to their already misery over the presidents demise. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd is a lyric poem in the form on an elegy,
Whitman refused to seek comfort in the supernatural; the Christian vision of eternal life in heaven that Milton found in "Lycidas" was not available to him, and he deliberately avoided any suggestion of it. The lilacs will return; Lincoln will not, and he will have no life other than the one he has lost, not even in nature, for Whitman significantly refrained from invoking the view taken in section 6 of "Song of Myself," that death is no more than part of the continuum of life ("The smallest sprout shows there is really no death . . .") and thus may be dismissed as inconsequential. Whitman's experience of the Civil War, including of course his service in the hospitals, had evidently tempered his outlook; he had seen too much of death to dismiss it so readily