Questions about When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What is When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd about?
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd is Walt Whitman's elegy for President Abraham Lincoln, written in the summer of 1865 following Lincoln's assassination on the 14th of April that year. The 206-line free-verse poem uses three central symbols -- lilacs, the planet Venus as a fallen star, and the hermit thrush -- to move from grief toward an acceptance of death. Whitman neither names Lincoln nor describes the circumstances of his death in the poem.
When was When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd first published?
The poem was first published in autumn 1865 as part of Sequel to Drum-Taps, a 24-page pamphlet of eighteen poems that Whitman had printed by Gibson Brothers in Washington. It was later absorbed into the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1867, and reached its final sixteen-strophe form in the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass published in 1881.
What do the three symbols in When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd represent?
Biographer David S. Reynolds identifies the poem's three central symbols as autobiographical. The lilacs represent Whitman's love for Lincoln; the fallen star, which is the planet Venus, represents Lincoln himself; and the hermit thrush represents death or its song. Whitman gathered much of his knowledge of the hermit thrush from his friend John Burroughs, an aspiring nature writer who described the bird's song as "the finest sound in nature."
Did Walt Whitman attend Lincoln's funeral?
Whitman almost certainly did not attend Lincoln's public funeral in Washington, held on the 19th of April 1865, because he did not leave Brooklyn for the capital until the 21st of April. He also missed the New York ceremonies, observed on the 24th of April. Biographer Jerome Loving suggests that Whitman's descriptions of the funeral procession and the 1,700-mile journey of the coffin to Springfield, Illinois, were based on second-hand information.
How did Whitman's poem influence T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land?
Scholars have identified direct borrowings from Whitman's elegy in The Waste Land, published in 1922, including the prominent use of lilacs, April, "dry grass singing," and the image of a hermit thrush singing in pine trees. Eliot told the author Ford Madox Ford that Whitman's lines featuring lilacs and the hermit thrush were the poem's only "good lines." Critic Cleo McNelly Kearns wrote that Whitman's poem gave The Waste Land its very "tone and pace."
Which composers have set When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd to music?
The poem has inspired a long line of musical settings across more than a century. Major works include Charles Villiers Stanford's Elegiac Ode, Op. 21 (1884); Gustav Holst's Ode to Death (1919); Karl Amadeus Hartmann's First Symphony, premiered in Frankfurt am Main in May 1948; Paul Hindemith's Requiem for those we love (1946); Kurt Weill's opera Street Scene (1946); George T. Walker Jr.'s Lilacs, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Music; Roger Sessions's cantata dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; and Jennifer Higdon's Dooryard Bloom, premiered on the 16th of April 2005.