By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ is one of the most famous poems by the American poet, Walt Whitman (1819-92). Across 206 lines of innovative free verse, Whitman offers an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, who had been assassinated shortly before Whitman wrote the poem. You can read ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand’ is a Walt Whitman poem addressed to his reader, and might be viewed as a disclaimer for all of Whitman’s poetry – much as another of his famous poems, ‘Song of Myself’, can be read as his declaration or credo.
‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand’ appeared in Whitman’s landmark 1855 collection Leaves of Grass and is charged with erotic, sensual language, suggesting the importance of the physical body to Whitman’s poetics, and the close relationship he envisions between himself and his reader. First, here’s the text of the poem, followed by a few words of analysis.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
One of the shortest of Walt Whitman’s great poems, ‘O Me! O Life!’ was featured in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society: Robin Williams’s character recites it to his class. ‘O Me! O Life!’ contains many of the features of Walt Whitman’s greatest poetry: the free verse rhythm, the alternation between long and short lines, the rhetorical (or not-so-rhetorical?) questions, the focus on the self.
Before we offer a fuller analysis of the poem, here’s a reminder of ‘O Me! O Life!’.
One of several poems Walt Whitman wrote about Abraham Lincoln, and probably the best, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ was written in the summer of 1865, in the aftermath of the assassination of Lincoln in April of that year. An example of the pastoral elegy, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ wasn’t considered one of Whitman’s best poems by Whitman himself. However, many of his readers have disagreed, and think this among his finest.
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
Even those who aren’t familiar with Walt Whitman’s poems may recognise ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, thanks to its use in the 1989 Robin Williams film Dead Poets Society. Like another of Whitman’s poems, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ was written in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s death in 1865, and is slightly different from much of Whitman’s best-known poetry in that it has a more regular rhyme scheme. The poem became among his best-known, to the extent that Whitman almost regretted writing it later.
O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;