Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  Mourning Lincoln, grieving over his blighted book, sometime that week Whitman compromised. Before leaving New York, on April 21, he ordered the Bradstreet Bindery to sew up a hundred copies of Drum-Taps. He returned to Washington on April 22 with the full printer’s copy, which he later presented to Peter Doyle.

  According to the terms of his extended furlough, Whitman was supposed to return to Washington on Monday, April 17, where he would have witnessed the funeral rituals he later commemorated in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” For nearly a century, until the publication of F. DeWolfe Miller’s study of the receipts and letters concerning the printing of Drum-Taps in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection in the Library of Congress, scholars assumed that Whitman based “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” upon his personal experience of Lincoln’s funeral, or the torchlit night procession of the funeral train, or possibly both. A careful reading of the exchanges among Whitman, Eckler, and the bindery reveals that Whitman instead gathered his imagery from reading newspaper accounts. Passing from printer to binder in Manhattan, or from the Patent Office to Gardner’s Gallery and newsstand on D Street in Washington, Whitman studied the black-bordered morning and evening editions covering the funeral train’s progress. He devoured the language of grief he found in the papers hawked on street corners.

  He was with the printer and binder in New York when the civic procession escorted the hearse from the White House to the Capitol, as the bands played the dead march. He was traveling south about the time the funeral train took its slow course north (he may actually have passed the coffin going the other way), arriving in Washington just as Lincoln’s remains were placed in the rotunda of New York’s City Hall for viewing.

  The dark cortege as it moved from City Hall up Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River Depot—twenty thousand Union troops in blue, and eighty thousand civilian mourners of every race, religion, and political persuasion—was witnessed by more than a million people. Whitman was far away.

  “New York never before saw such a day,” said the New York Herald. “Rome in the palmiest days of its power never witnessed such a triumphal march . . .” The funeral train continued its journey to Illinois, as every major city on the route arranged its own elaborate ceremonies, described in detail in newspapers that sold almost as fast as they could be printed. In Washington, Whitman mourned quietly, introspectively, alone or in the company of Burroughs, O’Connor, and Doyle. He returned to his copy work and his visits to the hospitals.

  Sometime in late April Whitman began, in black pencil on white-woven paper, to make notes for a formal elegy for Lincoln. He noted: “As to the other Presidents, in life & death, they have had their due in formal & respectful treatment, in life & death. But this one alone has touch’d the popular heart to its deepest. For this one alone, through every City, every Country farm, the untouch’d meal, the heavy heart & moistened eye and the song in private chambers[.]” He resolved to “make a list of things, sights, scenes, landscapes, rivers . . . and bring it in / also in dim perspective, the large and varied future /

  No mourning drape hang

  I about my song

  But these I hang &

  plant about my song.

  He started his list with the words of mourning, probably gathered from newspapers or from a thesaurus:

  Sorrow grieve sad mourn (I use) mourning mournful melancholy dismal heavy-hearted tears black sobbing sighing funereal rites wailing lamenting . . .

  This is clearly a cathartic free-association meant to generate the funereal language for his elegy. The vocabulary list, more than a hundred words in three columns, evolves from terms of extroverted grieving to:

  depression pain of mind passionate regret afflicted with grief cast down downcast gloomy serious Sympathy moving compassion tenderness tender-hearted full of pity . . .

  Several of these phrases, such as “passionate regret,” reveal Whitman’s feelings about losing this compatriot with whom he had felt such an affinity, one he had often praised as “tender-hearted” and “full of pity,” this nodding acquaintance he had wished might someday become a friend.

  From the simple listing of elegiac words in his notebook, Whitman advanced to the description of the hermit thrush, which became the symbol for his poetic expression of grief:

  Hermit Thrush / Solitary Thrush / moderate sized grayish brown bird / sings oftener after sundown sometimes quite in the night / is very secluded / likes shaded, dark places in swamps—is very shy / song clear and deliberate—has a solemn effect—his song is a hymn / real, serious sweet . . .

  —only those that frequent the deep remote dark woods hear it— . . .

  —it is perhaps all the more precious, because it is only sung in secluded places—he never sings near the farm houses—never in the settlement / is the bird of the solemn primal woods & of Nature pure & holy—

  A letter from John Burroughs to Myron Benton (a friend of Whitman’s) that summer comments that Whitman “is deeply interested in what I tell him of the Hermit Thrush, and says he has used largely the information I have given him in one of his principal poems.” Burroughs called the hermit thrush’s song “The finest sound in Nature. It is not a proud, gorgeous strain like the tanager’s or the grosbeak’s . . . it suggests no passion or emotion—nothing personal, but seems to be the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in his best moments. It realizes peace and a deep, solemn joy that only the finest souls may know.” The picture of that great naturalist leading the “Good Gray Poet” through swamps at midnight to hear the thrush is an appealing bit of lore attached to the story of the poem’s genesis. But Whitman may not have heard the elusive thrush, any more than he had seen the funeral train.

  To be sure, there were lilacs in abundance that spring, with their purple, drooping panicles, their heady scent; and there was the “western star,” Venus, low in the sky in the evenings. But this is more a poem of deep imaginative reflection than of immediate experience. “Lilacs” is one of the most self-consciously literary, deliberately constructed poems Whitman ever wrote. So much of his verse, particularly the war poetry of Drum-Taps, has the immediacy of an eyewitness account. This poem, probably Whitman’s greatest, does not. It is an uncommonly long and complex lyric of more than two hundred lines, with epic qualities. And unlike many of Whitman’s long poems, its twenty-one sections are in continuous development from the first sight of the fragrant flower to the sound of the thrush in the woods at the close.

  I give you my sprig of lilac.

  (Nor for you, for one, alone;

  Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring . . .

  Although Whitman still visited wounded and dying soldiers every afternoon after a day’s work in the Patent Office building, his other activities slowed. His notebook entries and correspondence dwindled, as he spent more and more of his lamplit hours in his room writing, mining the imagery of the Washington spring and his memories of Lincoln.

  And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?

  . . .

  O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?

  And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,

  To adorn the burial-house of him I love?

  Pictures of growing spring, and farms, and homes . . .

  His meditation would lead him ultimately to “the knowledge of death as walking one side of me / And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me, / And I in the middle, as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions . . .” The poet would serve as a ferryman, a guide to the river of the dead, one who understands the healing power of death.

  The richness of the poem comes from Whitman’s skillful braiding of the strands of three major images—blossom, star, and bird—throughout an epic drama, whose suspense is prolonged until the final verses. The setting is the geography of the nation, as the funeral train passes through cities and towns, farms and fields. But the scene has a metaphysical dimension, opening into t
he realm of death—which perhaps no poet has ever known so intimately—and the future “ever-returning spring,” where he, and his poem, will mourn perennially.

  The dramatic situation is straightforward: the grieving poet, trapped in the “harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul,” desires to offer a fitting tribute to the man he loves, the President he reveres. The question is this: What could possibly suffice, for a hero so grand and bereavement so profound? The answer may be found in the poem’s panoramic sweep.

  1

  When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,

  And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

  I mourn’d . . . and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

  O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;

  Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,

  And thought of him I love.

  2

  O powerful, western, fallen star!

  O shades of night! O moody, tearful night!

  O great star disappear’d! O the black murk that hides the star!

  O cruel hands that hold me powerless! O helpless soul of me!

  O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul!

  3

  In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,

  Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

  With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,

  With every leaf a miracle . . . . . . and from this bush in the door-yard,

  With its delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

  A sprig, with its flower, I break.

  4

  In the swamp, in secluded recesses,

  A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

  Solitary, the thrush,

  The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,

  Sings by himself a song.

  Song of the bleeding throat!

  Death’s outlet song of life—(for well, dear brother I know,

  If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.)

  5

  Over the breast of spring, the land, amid cities,

  Amid lanes, and through old woods, (where lately the violets peep’d

  from the ground, spotting the gray debris;)

  Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes—passing the endless grass;

  Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the

  dark-brown fields uprising;

  Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards;

  Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,

  Night and day journeys a coffin.

  6

  Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,

  Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,

  With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black,

  With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,

  With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,

  With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,

  With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,

  With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn;

  With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour’d around the coffin,

  The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—Where amid these you journey,

  With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang;

  Here! coffin that slowly passes,

  I give you my sprig of lilac.

  7

  (Nor for you, for one, alone;

  Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring:

  For fresh as the morning—thus would I chant a song for you, O sane

  and sacred death.

  All over bouquets of roses,

  O death! I cover you over with roses and early lilies;

  But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,

  Copious, I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes:

  With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,

  For you and the coffins all of you, O death.)

  8

  O western orb, sailing the heaven!

  Now I know what you must have meant, as a month since we walk’d,

  As we walk’d up and down in the dark blue so mystic,

  As we walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,

  As I saw you had something to tell, as you bent to me night after night,

  As you droop’d from the sky low down, as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on;)

  As we wander’d together the solemn night (for something I know not what, kept me from sleep;)

  As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west, ere you went, 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, dissatisfied, sank, as where you, sad orb,

  Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.

  9

  Sing on, there in the swamp!

  O singer bashful and tender! I hear your notes—I hear your call;

  I hear—I come presently—I understand you;

  But a moment I linger—for the lustrous star has detain’d me;

  The star, my comrade, departing, holds and detains me.

  10

  O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?

  And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?

  And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?

  Sea-winds, blown from east and west,

  Blown from the eastern sea, and blown from the western sea, till there

  on the prairies meeting:

  These, and with these, and the breath of my chant,

  I perfume the grave of him I love.

  11

  O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?

  And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,

  To adorn the burial-house of him I love?

  Pictures of growing spring, and farms, and homes,

  With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray-smoke lucid and bright,

  With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air;

  With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific;

  In the distance the flowing gaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there;

  With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows;

  And the city at hand, with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,

  And all the scenes of life, and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.

  12

  Lo! body and soul! this land!

  Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships;

  The varied and ample land—the South and the North in the light—

  Ohio’s shores, and flashing Missouri,

  And ever the far-spreading prairies, cover’d with grass and corn.

  Lo! the most excellent sun, so calm and haughty;

  The violet and purple morn, with just-felt breezes:

  The gentle, soft-born, measureless light;

  The miracle, spreading, bathing all—the fulfill’d noon;

  The coming eve, delicious—the welcome night, and the stars,

  Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

  13

  Sing on! sing on, you gray-brown bird!

  Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;

 
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

  Sing on, dearest brother—warble your reedy song;

  Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.

  O liquid, and free, and tender!

  O wild and loose to my soul! O wondrous singer!

  You only I hear . . . . . . yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart;)

  Yet the lilac, with mastering odor, holds me.

  14

  Now while I sat in the day, and look’d forth,

  In the close of the day, with its light, and the fields of spring, and the farmer preparing his crops,

  In the large unconscious scenery of my land, with its lakes and forests,

  In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds, and the storms;)

  Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,

  The many-moving sea-tides,—and I saw the ships how they sail’d,

  And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,

  And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages;

  And the streets, how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent,—lo! then and there,

  Falling among them all, and upon them all, enveloping me with the rest,

  Appeared the cloud, appear’d the long black trail;

  And I knew Death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.

  15

  Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,

  And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,

  And I in the middle, as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,