Whitman's Diction

The Exploration of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

Walt Whitman is perhaps one of the most famous American poets of all time and is considered by many to be one of the most noteworthy to come out of the nineteenth century alone. Although he had a minimal formal education, Whitman work around literary works of all kinds during his careers as a printer, reporter, editor and school teacher. Whitman’s style of poetry was at times untraditional in a sense that he would include both long and some extremely short cadences into his works. Whereas, poetry of the day followed a more regular meter and rhythm pattern, Whitman’s could contain different styles within an individual work. Whitman wrote “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” as an elegy mourning Abraham Lincoln’s death in the spring of 1865. The style that was used and will be further examined in this paper is elegiac, which consists of a hexameter verse followed by a pentameter verse. An elegy uses the elegiac form to make a poem or even a song mourning an individual. Next, the thoughts that may come to mind when

Within the first stanza of his work you can get a sense of the suddenness that the loss of Lincoln had on the people. The first stanza allows the reader to envision during the last bloom of the Lilacs in spring there was a sudden falling star seen in the nights sky. As read in the first two lines, “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night.” At the very moment this star is falling, Abraham Lincoln in wounded and ultimately dies from an assassin’s bullet which shocks everyone at that time. Whitman goes on to write that every spring he will imagine that falling star, when the lilacs are in bloom, which will remind him of this great man that has been