When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

• 1. Introduction

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  When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd began not at a writing desk but in a dooryard in Brooklyn, where Walt Whitman stepped outside to grieve. On the morning of the 15th of April 1865, the news reached him at his mother's home: President Abraham Lincoln had been shot the previous evening at Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth and had just died. Whitman walked out the door. The lilacs were in full bloom. Years later he recalled the moment in his prose memoir Specimen Days, writing that he found himself "always reminded of great tragedy of that day by the sight and odor of these blossoms. It never fails." A smell, a yard, a morning of national shock -- and from these ingredients, one of the most formally ambitious elegies in American literature took root. What does a 206-line poem written in free verse owe to a farmhouse dooryard? How did a man who likely missed Lincoln's own funeral procession write one of its most enduring tributes? And why, more than a century later, were composers from Germany to California still setting these lines to music?

• 2. The Man Who Missed the Funeral

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  Whitman had been living through the war at close range for years before Lincoln died. He had moved from New York to Washington, D.C. at the start of the conflict and volunteered in army hospitals as what he called a "hospital missionary", working through a series of government offices that included the Army Paymaster's Office and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. His brother, George Washington Whitman, had been captured in Virginia on the 30th of September 1864 and held for five months in Libby Prison, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp near Richmond. When George was finally furloughed home in poor health on the 24th of February 1865, Walt traveled to his mother's house in Brooklyn to see him. While there, he contracted with the Brooklyn printer Peter Eckler to publish Drum-Taps, his 72-page collection of 43 Civil War poems. That visit placed him at his mother's home when Lincoln was killed two weeks later. Lincoln's public funeral in Washington was held on the 19th of April 1865. Whitman biographer Jerome Loving concluded that Whitman did not attend -- he had not left Brooklyn for Washington until the 21st of April. The ceremonies in New York came on the 24th of April, also after Whitman's departure. Loving suggests Whitman's detailed descriptions of the funeral procession and the 1,700-mile journey of Lincoln's coffin westward to Springfield, Illinois, may have drawn on second-hand accounts. He does allow one tantalizing possibility: that Whitman, traveling from New York back to Washington, may have passed the Lincoln funeral train somewhere near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

• 3. A Poem Assembled in Grief

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  Drum-Taps was already being printed when Lincoln was shot. Whitman paused the press to insert a quickly written poem, "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day", whose subtitle places its composition on the 19th of April 1865, four days after Lincoln's death. He was unsatisfied with it. Back in Washington, he contracted with Gibson Brothers to publish a separate 24-page pamphlet of eighteen poems titled Sequel to Drum-Taps, with the subtitle When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd and other poems. The title poem, which Whitman had written over the summer, filled the first nine pages. The pamphlet also contained "O Captain! My Captain!", the only other poem in the pair to address the assassination directly. In October, after the pamphlet was printed, Whitman returned to Brooklyn to have it physically integrated with copies of Drum-Taps. He later absorbed all 43 poems from Drum-Taps and the 18 from the Sequel into the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass, printed in 1867 by William E. Chapin. Professors Kenneth Price and Ed Folsom, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Iowa respectively, describe that fourth edition as "the most carelessly printed and most chaotic of all the editions", citing conflicts with typesetters and a book that appeared in five different formats -- some including the Drum-Taps poems, some without. The 1867 volume contained 236 poems in total, up from the original twelve in the slim pamphlet of 1855.

• 4. Three Symbols, One Grief

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  Whitman never names Lincoln in the poem, and he never describes how the president died. Biographer Jerome Loving explains that this is conventional; elegies traditionally withhold the name of the dead "in order to allow the lament to have universal application." Instead, the poem is held together by what biographer David S. Reynolds calls a "trinity" of symbols, which he reads as autobiographical. The lilacs represent Whitman's own love for Lincoln. The fallen star -- the planet Venus, which Whitman had observed shining unusually bright in the evening sky in the weeks before the assassination -- stands for Lincoln himself. The hermit thrush, singing from the depths of swamps and dark pines, represents death or its chant. Whitman's knowledge of the thrush was partly borrowed. His friend John Burroughs, who lived from 1837 to 1921 and would become a noted nature writer, had spent time in the woods before returning to his post at the Treasury Department in Washington in the summer of 1865. Burroughs recalled that Whitman had been "deeply interested in what I tell him of the hermit thrush" and said Whitman told him he "largely used the information I have given him in one of his principal poems." Burroughs had described the bird's song as "the finest sound in nature... perhaps more of an evening than a morning hymn." Whitman took copious notes, writing that the thrush "sings oftener after sundown... is very secluded... His song is a hymn... in swamps -- is very shy... never sings near the farm houses." Scholar James Edwin Miller notes that "The hermit thrush is an American bird, and Whitman made it his own in his Lincoln elegy," adding that the bird's song becomes the source of Whitman's reconciliation not only to Lincoln's death but to death itself.

• 5. Craft and Incantation

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  The final published form of the poem, which appeared in the 1881 seventh edition of Leaves of Grass and has been reprinted in that form ever since, runs 206 lines divided into sixteen sections, called cantos or strophes. The poem began as 21 strophes in 1865, was trimmed to 20 by 1871, and reached its final sixteen-strophe shape in 1881 when Whitman consolidated the last seven sections of the original into three. Literary critic and Harvard University professor Helen Vendler describes its architecture precisely: the poem "builds up to its longest and most lyrical moment in canto 14, achieves its moral climax in canto 15, and ends with a coda of 'retrievements out of the night' in canto 16." Line length across the poem varies from seven syllables to as many as twenty, and there is no consistent metrical pattern. What creates the sensation of structure is something harder to pin down. Scholar James Perrin Warren identifies three core techniques: syntactic parallelism, repetition, and cataloguing. According to Raja Sharma, Whitman's use of anaphora -- repeating a word or phrase at the start of successive lines -- forces the reader "to inhale several bits of text without pausing for breath, and this breathlessness contributes to the incantatory quality." Scholar Betty Erkkila described Whitman's cataloguing as the "overarching figure of Leaves of Grass," and wrote that his lists work "by juxtaposition, image association, and by metonymy to suggest the interrelationship and identity of all things." Scholar Daniel Hoffman called Whitman "a poet whose hallmark is anaphora" and described the device as "a poetry of beginnings" whose variations allow him "to vary the tempo or feeling, to build up climaxes or drop off in innuendoes."

• 6. Eliot, Verdenal, and The Waste Land

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  T. S. Eliot, who lived from 1888 to 1965, drew directly from Whitman's elegy when writing The Waste Land in 1922. Scholars have identified the lilacs, the April setting, and passages about "dry grass singing" and a hermit thrush singing in pine trees as clear echoes of Whitman's poem. Eliot himself acknowledged as much, telling the author Ford Madox Ford that Whitman's lines adorned with lilacs and the hermit thrush were the poem's only "good lines." Critic Cleo McNelly Kearns wrote that Whitman's poem gives The Waste Land "not only motifs and images... but its very tone and pace, the steady andante which makes of both poems a walking meditation." Scholar Alan Shucard also connected Eliot's famous image of a third figure walking beside the speaker to Whitman's fourteenth strophe, where the speaker walks 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 with companions" (lines 121-123). Beginning in the 1950s, critics began to ask whether The Waste Land was itself an elegy to a specific person -- a male friend. English poet Stephen Spender, whom Eliot published at Faber & Faber in the 1920s, speculated the poem mourned Jean Jules Verdenal, a French medical student with literary interests who died during the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. Eliot had explored Paris and its surroundings with Verdenal in 1910 and 1911. Scholar James Edwin Miller recalls that Eliot associated Verdenal with a memory of the young man "coming across the Luxembourg Garden in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilacs," during a journey the two took in April 1911 to a garden on the outskirts of Paris. Miller concluded that "It seems unlikely that Eliot's long poem, in the form in which it was first conceived and written, would have been possible without the precedence of Whitman's own experiments in similar forms."

• 7. A Century of Musical Settings

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  Charles Villiers Stanford's Elegiac Ode, Op. 21, completed in 1884, may have reached a wider audience during Whitman's own lifetime than the poem itself did. Scored for baritone and soprano soloists, chorus and orchestra, across four movements, it was one of the first major compositions to set Whitman's text. After World War I, Gustav Holst turned to the poem's final section for his Ode to Death, completed in 1919, composing it to mourn friends killed in the war. Holst viewed Whitman as a "New World prophet of tolerance and internationalism." In 1936, the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann, who lived from 1905 to 1963, began setting a German translation of an excerpt from Whitman's elegy for an intended cantata that he gave various titles, eventually incorporating the setting as the second movement of a work he designated his First Symphony Versuch eines Requiem, meaning Attempt at a Requiem. Hartmann withdrew all his compositions from performance in Germany during the Nazi era, and the work was not heard until its premiere in Frankfurt am Main in May 1948. The commission that produced Paul Hindemith's setting arrived in 1945, when American conductor Robert Shaw and his choral ensemble, the Robert Shaw Chorale, asked Hindemith to set Whitman's text as a tribute to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had died on the 12th of April 1945. Hindemith titled the work When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd: A Requiem for those we love, scored it in eleven sections for mezzo-soprano and baritone soloists, mixed choir, and full orchestra, and incorporated a Jewish melody called Gaza. It premiered on the 20th of April 1946 under Shaw's direction. Musicologist David Neumeyer regards it as Hindemith's "only profoundly American work." African-American composer George T. Walker Jr., who lived from 1922 to 2018, won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his composition Lilacs for voice and orchestra, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the 1st of February 1996. In 2004, the Brooklyn Philharmonic commissioned the American composer Jennifer Higdon to adapt the poem, and the resulting work Dooryard Bloom received its first performance on the 16th of April 2005, with baritone Nmon Ford performing under conductor Michael Christie. Roger Sessions, commissioned by the University of California at Berkeley to set the poem for their centennial anniversary in 1964, did not finish the cantata until the 1970s, dedicating it to the memories of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, who were both assassinated within weeks of each other in 1968.