Whitman and the Ironic Bird-Symbol

When at first the reader of Whitman’s elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln, When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, comes to peruse the poem, he believes that he would taste the bitter cup of grief. The opening of the poem assures him of this with supreme pretension – with the introduction of the drooping star in the West. The ever-returning spring seems to bring the never­-failing autumn of melancholy. But soon we are brought to the door of the Lilac, with its heart-shaped leaves of rich greenery implicitly offering a contrast to the drooping star. The tone of reconciliation with the processes of nature manifests itself too early, as a perceptive reader discerns it.

But the bird now makes its appearance, as though to reassure us and strengthen us in the belief of mourning which the poem undertakes to embody. It has a bleeding throat and sings Death’s outlet song of life.

The symbols in the poem are introduced in an ascending order of significance. This is at once curious and shocking – curious,–­because in such an order, – the star, which ought to be the supreme symbol, if the poem were to be a genuine elegy, should appear after the lilac and the bird should proceed from strength to strength. But as it is, it makes its appearance early in the poem and gradually pales into insignificance before the lilac that symbo­lises nature’s process and the bird that gives us a touch of mystic rapture, transporting us to the realms beyond, compelling us to see life in death and death in life in the penultimate stanza, in which the dead soldiers are said to be at rest, while the living remain in agony worse than death:

They themselves were fully at rest, they
suffer’d not
The living remain’d and suifer’d, the
mother suffer’d
And the wife and the child and the musing
comrade suffer’d
And the armies that remain’d suffered.¹

But to return to the argument of the poem, the “spring of lilac” makes its appearance again, though with a significant variation of emphasis. The poet characterizes death as sane and sacred. The death of Lincoln is now one with the death of the soldiers slain in the civil war.

Presently the star appears again, but with a retrospective refe­rence by the poet as to his inability to understand what it meant when it first made its appearance. Well, this is only a passing vision and holds him but a moment:

But a moment I linger, for the
lustrous star has detain’d me
The star my departing comrade holds
and detains me.²

The bird, the singer “bashful and tender”, beckons him and the poet assures the bird: “I understood you”. The momentary hold of the star escapes him, thus delivering him into the bands of the bird with its greater lure. But the poet is a bird, too. He can “warble” for the “dead one”. The breath of his chant and the seawinds go to deck “the grave of him I love.”

From the ethereal realms where the star dwells, we are gradually brought to the “scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning” – from the heights of poetic ecstasy to the depths of mundane realism. This remarkable transition is achieved by a rhythmic retrogression in the synse that the star which has its abode in space, instead of exercising its hold, yields place to the bird, –the bird, – which can soar only sky-high at best and can scarcely touch the star-seated realms. This dramatic downfall is hastened by the bird paling before the poet in his physical aspect.

The implications of such a poetic manipulation are obvious. The star which is said to represent supreme grief at Lincoln’s death is made subordinate to the bird with its conciliatory tone of seeing life in death and death in life - in its turn subordinated to the poet who strikes the universal note, thus reducing the intensity of our grief at Lincoln’s death, instead of accentuating it, as the elegy promises to do, at the start.

The thirteenth stanza brings into light the poet’s confrontation with the bird, the lilac, as well as the star. The hold of the star has become fainter than earlier in the poem, which is to be, seen in the preference of the poet for the lilac, and his even greater pre­ference for the bird (whom he calls “dearest brother”):

O liquid and free and tender!
Will and loose to my soul–
0 wondrous singer!
You only I hear – yet the star holds me,
(but will soon depart)
Yet the liac with mastering odour holds me. ³

Thus the poet is on the road to eschew sooner or later both the star and the lilac, in preference to the bird.

The climatic fourteenth stanza attempts a philosophical sequestration of the thought of death from the knowledge of death. This metaphysical disquisition, coupled with the comradeship of the poet with the “Thought” of death and the “knowledge” of death, as well as the ready welcome accorded to them by the bird (“The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three”)⁴ sets at naught the pretensions of individual grief and personal loss, despite the latter utterance; “And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.” ⁵

The bird invites the “lovely and soothing death”. The invitation to the “strong deliveries” by the bird, is more in accordance with oriental philosophy, a system of thought where death is regarded as a natural phenomenon for which no tears need be shed. This philosophization, coming from Whitman, hardly justifies the intended tone of the elegy.

In the fifteenth stanza, the dead Lincoln totally loses the con­solation of being chosen for individual mourning, as the “battle-­corpses” of the civil was brought in, though with an ironic reference that they are dead and are at rest, while they that remain, suffer:

They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d. ⁶

Such a philosophization is more appropriate to a poem or Shelley steeped in platonism, not for Whitman’s Lilacs which under­takes to enshrine individual grief and personal mourning.

“The hermit bird” with “death’s outlet song”, thus pervades the whole poem, and if a poem may be said to have a hero, the bird, and not Lincoln, can be described as the hero of the poem, contrary to the expectations of the reader about the real intentions of the poem.

REFERENCES

¹ Whitman: When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d, Stanza 15, 11
² Ibid., Stanza 9, 11 69-70.
³ Ibid., Stanza 13, 11 104-107.
⁴ Ibid., Stanza 14, 1 127.
⁵ Ibid., Stanza 14, 1 128.
⁶ Ibid., Stanza 15, 11 181-184.