Critical appreciation of the poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is one of the most famous poems of Walt Whitman. It is one of four elegies entitled ‘Memories of President Lincoln’. An elegy is a lyric poem setting forth the poet’s mediations upon death. It is characterized by conventional language expressing with dignity and decorum a formal grief. The classical form of the elegy is common to both Latin and Greek literature.

          ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed’ is a long elegy in sixteen sections on death of Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th president of America. Whitman loved him who waged a civil war for the freedom of the Negro slaves and saved his country from disintegration. He loved Lincoln for his honesty, sympathy, courage, and determination. So Whitman was profoundly shocked by his assassination in April 1865, soon after his the concussion of the American civil war.

          When Lilac Last at the Dooryard Bloomed is an elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Like most elegies, it develops from the personal to the impersonal from an intense feeling of grief to the thought of reconciliation. The poem, which is one of the finest, Whitman ever wrote, is a dramatization of this feeling of loss.

          The first cycle of the poem, section 1-4, presents the setting in clear perspective. As spring returns, the lilacs blossom, and the plant Venus “nearly dropp’d in the western sky,” the poet mourns the loss ‘of him I love’. He mourns the ‘powerful western fallen star’ now covered by ‘black murk’ in the ‘tearful night’ and he is powerless and helpless because they could around him ‘will not free my soul’.

The second cycle of the poem, sections 5-9. It describes the journey of the coffin through natural scenery and industrial cities, both representing facets of American life.

In the third cycle of the poem, sections 10-13, the poet wonders how he shall sing “for the large sweet soul that has gone”. How shall he compose his tribute for the “dead one there I loved”? The pictures on the dead president’s tomb, he says, should be of spring and sun and Leaves, a river, hills, and the sky, the city dense with dwellings, and people at work-in short, all the scenes of life.

Sections 14-16 comprise a perspective of immortality. The poet remembers that one day while he sat in the peaceful but ‘unconscious scenery of my land’, a cloud with a ‘long black trail’ appeared and enveloped everything. Suddenly he knew death. He walked between the knowledge of death and the thought of death.

Thus the poem begins with an invocation to spring, continuous description of nature joining in the mourning over death of the great man, description of the procession of mourners, and flowers brought to deck the hearse. And there is a closing consolation that death is powerful over everything and at the dead only full rest, and the realization that death is the entry to a higher life.