When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

This article is about the Walt Whitman poem. For the Paul Hindemith work, see When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (Hindemith).

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd is an elegy written by Walt Whitman shortly after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Admired as one of Whitman's greatest poems, "Lilacs" has influenced many other works in literature and the arts.

The other poems in Leaves of Grass Book XXII – "O Captain! My Captain!", "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day", and the brief "This Dust Was Once the Man" – also refer to Lincoln's death.

Symbolism

The second line of the poem "And the great star early droop'd ..." establishes the allusion to Lincoln. The blooming of the lilacs in April, the same month in which Lincoln was assassinated, serves as Whitman's yearly reminder of Lincoln's death. This star is historically the planet Venus, which was low in the sky at the time Whitman wrote his poem.

Music

Main article: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (Hindemith)

In 1936 the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann used parts of "Lilacs" in an intended Cantata for soprano and orchestra. It ultimately formed the second movement of his designated First Symphony.

Conductor Robert Shaw commissioned another German, Paul Hindemith, during his wartime exile in the United States, to set the text of "Lilacs" to music in his Requiem for those we love (1946). There is also a cantata by Roger Sessions setting this poem, written in 1971. David Conte extracted text from the poem for use in his "Invocation & Dance" (1989). George Crumb composed Apparition in 1979, using the text of "Lilacs", mostly from the "Death Carol" section of the poem. Kurt Weill uses the third stanza in his musical Street Scene.

Other Literature

• T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" alludes to "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" multiple times.
• Peter De Vries' novel The Blood of the Lamb uses motivs from Whitman's poem, including the brown thrush with its "unendurable" song, and the association of lilacs with death. The main character's daughter is also named Carol, possibly an allusion to the brown-grey thrush's "Carol of Death."
• The popularity of the poem has often made it subject to parody and satire.

Further reading

• Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Includes a chapter on the poem. ISBN 081664893X

External links

• Complete text of the poem, with hyperlinked commentary on symbolism
• Complete text of the poem, without commentary