Analysis Of When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard

1861 is the year that marked the American Civil War’s first battle. There was President Abraham Lincoln’s Union, which consisted of the northern “United” states of America, and there was the Confederacy, which consisted of the southern “Confederate” states of America. Each were vying for governmental control for their respective reasons. However, by the end of the Civil War in 1865, the scars that were left unhealed on the United State of America was far beyond any one citizen’s expectation. America’s own President Lincoln was assassinated, and this alone caused grave response from American citizens. Simultaneously, with a central purpose of the war being in either abolition or preservation of the practice of slavery, the then-controversy of racial justice soon entered debate. The Civil War, in whole, placed America in a state of turmoil that had yet to be seen by its subjects, and this consequently prompted a mass search for American identity in the wake of 620,000 deaths and an unforeseen national divide.

The assassination of President Lincoln, for example, prompted a political, social, and ultimately emotional, upheaval within most, if not all, of the nation. Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” is an accurate reflection of this paradigm shift. It was published as an elegy, otherwise described as a poem whose purpose is in tribute to loss of life. Here, Whitman attempts to translate into poetic language the emotional response of Americans at the time. He speaks of “the long black trail,” that envelopes “the fields all busy with labor,” “the infinite separate houses,” and the “streets . . . and the cities,” which tells of the widespread impact of Lincoln’s death on American land (Lilacs 118,