This poem, written after the assassination of Lincoln on April 14, 1865, is the third of the great Romantic meditations covered in this course. Like Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode and Keats’ Grecian Urn, Lilacs uses an event as a springboard to reflection on timeless themes: death, love, and

Like many Romantic poets, Whitman associates his own feelings with events in the natural world around him: his pain is linked with the last lilacs of April and the planet setting in the west. These three items constitute the "trinity" of stanza 1.

In 2-3 the poet turns to his pain, then to the lilac bush that he so closely associates with his feelings at this point. Then, without a transitional phrase, he moves in a different direction, to the thrush in the swamp in 4:

What features in the thrush’s existence seem to have meaning for the poet?

How do you understand the last line of this fourth stanza,

"If thou wast not granted to sing, thou would’st surely die."

Note: funeral processions have been deeply meaningful in history. Pericles’ funeral speech in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, read by many IH 51 students, begins with a procession. George Washington’s coffin was carried from state to state after his death. An interesting near-funeral procession is the trip of John Brown to his hanging, featured in a work of the painter Horace Pippin  in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In stanzas 5-6, the procession moves across the country.

Now, as we move along, it is essential to note the string of associations and oppositions. The coffin of the dead receives living flowers (roses, lilies, lilacs), all of them spring flowers. Pause for a moment: is springtime normally associated with death, or with fertility and birth? The answer may seem easy, but it is important to remember that in Christian thought the crucifixion occurs at the beginning of spring, and in many Christian churches, Easter is celebrated with a churchful of flowers. From that perspective, spring is indeed a time of death?and of rebirth. Whether rebirth is promised in Whitman’s poem is worth considering.

In the eighth stanza, the setting planet seems to have "something to tell." It is described as "bending" down and giving the narrator personal attention (another example of the romantic merging of the self and nature); it even has feelings ("woe")!

In 9, the poet turns, again abruptly, from the "western orb" to the thrush in the swamp. Clearly the thrush is going to be important, but Whitman is keeping it at the edge of our awareness for now. Instead he focuses on the star.  Who is the "comrade" in this passage?

In 10 we move back to the prairies, site of the winds coming together at the burial site in Springfield, Illinois. The poet asks (11) what to hang in the "burial-house," and comes up with an inventory of images (11-12): look these over. What regions do they include, and why do you think these particular images are significant?

Now (13) back to the thrush in the swamp with its "voice of uttermost woe." At the end of the stanza the star, the thrush, and the lilac all "hold" the poet (compare "detains" in 9). The poet goes "down to the shores of the water," (14) to the swamp, thinking of death and the "dark mother always gliding near with soft feet": ""O death." Death will wash the poet with her "bliss."

And now, the grief of the early stanzas seems to fade as the poet hazards a song, "floats a carol with joy." Significantly, this carol will go "over the … waves, over the .. fields and the prairies …, over the … cities and all the teeming wharves and ways." In other words, over what?

In 15, the poet turns back to the horrors of the Civil War and the survivors who almost envied the dead. He moves in his own procession (16) over the earth, thinking of comrades (now in the plural, second line of the stanza), part of a group?but who are the comrades, who are the "holders holding my hand"? That is worth looking back over the poem to find out, because our answer affects our understanding of the final lines, the "twining" of "Lilac and star and bird … with the chant of my soul."

There is much more to say about this poem. This reading is an attempt to expose some main themes for further discussion.  One question worth asking right now is, are we justified in speaking of this as an Easter poem?