26 pages • 52 minutes read
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
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Themes
Death as a Force in Art
The hermit thrush sings “death’s outlet song” (Canto 4, Line 7; Canto 16, Line 3), as the speaker goes on to “chant” (Canto 7, Line 3) and “warble” (Canto 10, Line 1) for death and for the dead. But this voice of “uttermost woe” (Canto 13, Line 5) also rings out “liquid and free and tender” (Canto 13, Line 6) from a “wondrous singer” (Canto 13, Line 7). For Whitman, the acute loss at death sharpens the experience of love, allowing its expression to achieve its most affecting artistic representation. He addresses the relation between artistic impulse and the understanding of mortality in his autobiographical poem “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking,” in which his birth as a poet occurs when he learns to understand the message of nature: death. Throughout “Lilacs,” the hermit thrush sings of death to the speaker, while the singer sings his elegy to the reader.
Canto 14’s shadowy forest consoles the speaker; his walk with the two death figures resolves his grief, reflecting the depth of his loss. This canto especially focuses on death as a driving artistic force, as the speaker’s knowledge of death heightens emotional and sensory experiences. Once he is both physically and intellectually ensconced in this death imagery, he can reveal the bird’s song of death. The bird sings of “lovely” and “soothing” death (Canto 14, Line 28), calling it the “dark mother” (Canto 14, Line 36), a generative force. Death, “vast and well-veiled” (Canto 14, Line 50), represents the infinite—open and free as the “open landscape and the high-spread sky” (Canto 14, Line 46) of Whitman’s America.
The acceptance of death’s knowledge in Canto 14 allows the speaker’s vision of relief and consolation in Canto 15 and gives way to resolution in Canto 16. The speaker steps away from his art: “I cease from my song for thee” (Canto 16, Line 11). But the “echo arous’d in my soul” (Canto 16, Line 16), the love for the dead, remains, like the poem’s images “twined within the chant of my soul” (Canto 16, Line 21).
Motion and Change
“Lilacs” explores and affirms the natural movement of nature and the inevitability of change. Whitman fills the poem with imagery representing change: the movement of the seasons, Venus’s orbit, migrating birds, crops ripening, the movement of the river, and workmen on their way home. His diction suggests motion with echoing participles: “growing spring,” “sinking sun, burning” (Canto 11, Lines 1 and 3), the tides “hurrying” (Canto 12, Line 2), the “afternoon swift passing” (Canto 14, Line 5). This motion happens with the world around the speaker as he stalls, delayed by his interaction with the star and the lilacs in the paralysis of recent grief.
In Canto 14, just before the speaker’s walk with the figures of death, he hovers above a busy world in motion, enacting the daily rituals of life. Besides the people in their houses and cities, he observes the “many-moving sea-tides” (Canto 14, Line 6) and the streets whose “throbbings throbb’d” (Canto 14, Line 10). At the end of the canto, the arrival of death’s cloud begins the speaker’s movement: He walks with figures of death on either side.
The speaker returns to full motion in Canto 16—the poem’s resolution. The word “passing” begins the first three lines of Canto 16 as the speaker leaves behind the images and symbols of the poem, the “varying ever-altering song” (Canto 16, Line 4) of the hermit thrush and himself in the form of the poem. He leaves the lilac in Line 9, “blooming, returning with spring” (Canto 16, Line 10). And though the song must end, the speaker remains “fronting the west, communing with thee” (Canto 16, Line 12), his interaction with the western star ever renewing.
Senses and Memory
Long before brain research would prove poets correct in their assumptions about the connection between sense and memory, Whitman engineered “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” to illustrate how sensory experiences impact memory. All five senses engage and connect to trauma, documenting and quantifying the substantive change grief makes in one’s life. Whitman’s extensive inclusion of American geography, people, and activity extends the trauma to a wider community, proposing that the sensory experiences of the entire nation make a lasting mark on its history and collective consciousness.
The titular lilacs seen throughout the poem evoke iconic olfactory images; Whitman reinforces their physical appearance by referring to their appearance: “delicate-color’d blossoms” (Canto 3, Line 5) and “heart-shaped leaves” (Canto 3, Lines 2 and 5). Like memory, their “perfume strong” (Canto 3, Line 3) pervades and lingers after the physical presence.
The auditory image of the hermit thrush’s song also lingers on the edge of the poem, moving in and out of the speaker’s description until its extended presence in Canto 14. The speaker’s chant manifests in the poem’s auditory features: alliterative patterns, anaphora, and repetition.
Among the sense-based imagery throughout the eras of lyric poetry, visual and auditory imagery dominate sensory experiences. But Whitman especially invokes the senses of smell, touch, and taste in “Lilacs” to reinforce the theme of artistic creation. The speaker in “Lilacs” converts his exquisite grief to art, and his sensitivity to his environment provides the means. He asks, “what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?” (Canto 16, Line 8), acknowledging that the images he harvests must be appropriate to commemorate and to depict the quality of his love for the dead.
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By Walt Whitman
