Whitman's "Lilacs" and the Grammars of Time

Author(s): Mutlu Konuk Blasing

Source: PMLA, Vol. 97, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 31-39
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462238
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MUTLU KONUK BLASING

Whitman's "Lilacs" and the Grammars of Time

C RITICS GENERALLY consider "When

history's stage through centuries, should sit there

Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

and be so completely interested and absorb'd in

those human jack-straws, moving about with

to be Whitman's best poem because it is

the most controlled; its form does not seem

their silly little gestures, foreign spirit, and

open-ended or arbitrary.' Since this preference

flatulent text." And the "drama" of Whitman's

implies a dismissal of Whitman's "language ex-

account of the assassination hinges on the con-

periment," to praise this poem is in effect to

trast between the fake drama on the stage and

damn Whitman, and some of his defenders have

the historical event, "when in the midst of this

comedy, or non-such, or whatever it is to be

been driven-by way of countering those who

would single it out as "the one poem to be cast

call'd, and to offset it, or finish it out, as if in

into bronze or chiseled into granite"-to the

Nature's and the great Muse's mockery of those

extreme of rejecting it as conventional, full of

poor mimes, came interpolated that scene, not

"shopworn" imagery, and lacking any "new or

really or exactly to be described at all, (for on

imaginative phrase."2 Even the poem's admirers

the many hundreds who were there it seems to

are correspondingly divided: while some remark

this hour to have left a passing blur, a dream, a

its musical qualities and its tonal and structural

blotch)." When Whitman tries to clarify or rep-

complexity, others sense something artificial-

resent "that scene," he stages the actual scene of

an almost decadent refinement.3

"confusion and terror," with its whole "atmo-

This division bespeaks something more than

sphere of shock and craze," in order to play up

the real drama: "In the midst of that pande-

the varieties of literary taste; it reflects a division

within the poem. In "Lilacs" Whitman tests the

monium, infuriated soldiers, the audience and

ways poetry can confront the terrorism of his-

the crowd, the stage, and all its actors and

actresses, its paint-pots, spangles, and gas-lights

tory and the fact of time. The poem contains

-the life blood from those veins, the best and

complex symbolism; some highly formal, cere-

monial narrative movements; and even a "musi-

sweetest of the land, drips slowly down. . .."6

cal" section like the thrush's song, which is usu-

Here the poles are theatrics and chaos, drama

ally taken to be the apotheosis of the elegy. Yet

and history. In contrast to theater, Lincoln's

"Lilacs" ultimately relinquishes and moves be-

murder is "history"; in contrast to the "blur" of

yond not only symbolism and the deliverance it

history, however, his death is "drama." Whit-

holds but the ritual redemptions of narrative and

man's account constantly negotiates between

the mimesis of natural music, with its promise of

these two poles in order to present the significant

oblivion. The concluding section of the poem is

drama of human life and death in historical

time.

not a conventional closure with a formal re-

statement of themes;4 it represents the new kind

"Lilacs" traces a similar progression: various

of poetry that will "suffice."

poetic "stages" are set up only to be abandoned

in a quest for a poetic speech adequate to the

The rhetorical strategy of Whitman's 1879

poem's occasion. The assassination of Lincoln,

description of President Lincoln's assassination

makes explicit the way in which the poetic struc-

who was the symbol of the Union and thus

ture of "Lilacs" functions. Whitman begins by

Whitman's political alter ego, represented a vio-

placing Lincoln in the theater, where the poet

lent rupture of national history, which must have

had often seen the president and thought, "How

made Whitman acutely conscious of time-of

funny it was that he, in some respects the lead-

the moment when the history of the individual

and the history of the nation coincided. "I reing actor in the stormiest drama known to real

31

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32

Whitman's "Lilacs" and the Grammars of Time

member where I was stopping at the time,"

ture of "Lilacs" reveals how Whitman tests and

Whitman writes, "the season being advanced,

moves beyond these poetic-grammatical fictions

there were many lilacs in full bloom. By one of

in his attempt to deal with historical violence

those caprices that enter and give tinge to events

and the accompanying personal shock. In "Li-

without being at all a part of them, I find myself

always reminded of the great tragedy of that day

by the sight and odor of these blossoms. It never

lacs" he evolves, as I hope to show, a new

grammar, a new wakefulness of words, so that

the poem can be more than just another funeral

fails" ("Death of Abraham Lincoln," p. 503).

service, the grand order of which covers up the

This freezing of the moment, which thereafter

insanity and the profanity of the assassination.

occupies a permanent place in memory, suggests

For if the poem were merely a chant to "sane

how such a violent, political, and unnatural

death shatters the flow and continuity of experi-

and sacred death," it would be no more than the

funeral of poetry as Whitman understood it. The

ence. The heightened awareness of time brought

"solution" of the Lincoln elegy, then, was the

about by the assassination led Whitman to ques-

dissolution of form. Thus "Lilacs" invites criti-

tion what forms were adequate to the new his-

tory.

cal experiment, since in it we find ourselves at

"the origin of all poems," where we can test the

Whitman's experimentalism had always car-

ried a significance that was more than formal.

As "Song of Myself" (first titled "Poem of Walt

psychic and historical function and efficacy of a

variety of poetic and linguistic forms and con-

ventions.

Whitman, an American") made clear, his poetic

experiment was an integral part of the personal

and national experiments. On all three fronts,

the risk lay in abandoning traditional definitions,

forms, and preordained, hierarchical orders and

opening up to experience, with its promise of

growth and its threat of disorder. Since Whit-

The difficulty of confronting the violence of

the event and the shattering of historical time is

indicated by how long Whitman takes to face up

to the present. The opening of the poem is a

grand evasion of the present:

man's rejection of conventional poetic forms

amounted to declaring his language fundamenWhen lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,

tally responsive and responsible to history, his

And the great star early droop'd in the western sky

in the night,

formal choices embody not simply aesthetic val-

ues but effective strategies for confronting per-

I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning

spring.
sonal and national history. Thus readings of

"Lilacs" by analogy to music or to "Lycidas" or

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

"Adonais" do not explain the shape of the poem

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the

as a whole, because they do not take into ac-

count the nature and implications of the history

west,

And thought of him I love.6

informing it-Lincoln's assassination.

The challenge of the assassination, then, was

at once literary, national, and personal. And the

possibility of continued affirmation of the per-

sonal and national experiments depended on

Whitman's formal resources-his ability to do

without recourse to conventional orders. Poetic

texts project time periods, and varieties of poetic

conventions and devices, as well as of gram-

matical constructions, make for different tem-

poral orders and create different fictions of time.

"Lilacs" consists of a series of such fictions, in-

cluding natural-cyclical time, historical-narrative

time, and lyric time with its eternal present. But

a formal analysis of the internal temporal struc-

The repetition of the trinity, together with Whit-

man's calling the natural conjunction of the star,

the lilacs, and Lincoln's death a "trinity," trans-

forms facts into metaphors. With repetition and

formalization, facts escape their concrete pres-

entness; as Ortega y Gasset observes, metaphoric

use "substitutes one thing by another, not so

much to arrive at as to escape from it."7 The

flight from objects and facts is accompanied by a

flight from the present, suggested by the projec-

tion of the cyclical and continuous time of na-

ture. The first stanza establishes a continuity

between the past and the future by fitting the

poet into the natural pattern: the opening

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33

Mutlu Konuk Biasing

"when" locks the star, the lilacs, and mourning

-the "sure" trinity-into a shared pattern of

repetition. The second stanza continues the

cyclical arrangement but moves, through a series

of echoes, into a present that is absent in the first

stanza: spring is ever returning, and it brings

bloomings and droopings. Tense endings and

words interpenetrate; verbal affinities underline

not only the fact of ongoing, ever-returning life

but the inexorability of the natural and verbal

order the poet invokes. Yet a shadow falls be-

tween the last time the lilacs bloomed and the

next time they will appear. The particular, his-

torical present is unspoken for-it is unspeak-

able. The silence of the stanza break formally

announces a break in the linear flow and intro-

duces only a new cycle, which repeats the first

stanza. In the conventional stanza break, the

violent rupture of the flow of time is formalized

and contained, and the past and future are re-

connected as mirror images. The long vowels

and the ceremonial repetitions emphasize the

formality and artificiality of this poetic pattern-

ing, which is designed to cover up the rupture of

time by establishing a natural continuity.

In contrast to this rather artificial parallel

construction, the structure of Section 2 mimics,

in a series of exclamations, a spontaneous out-

burst of grief. The presentation of emotion as

overflowing a syntax that would "round" and

complete its expression brings Section 2 closer

formally to a violated present that stands outside

a natural continuity:

A third kind of grammar enables the poet

finally, in Section 3, to confront the historical

present by means of a narrative mimesis of an

action that itself imitates the original breaking of

the time flow. This double mimesis-grammar

representing fictional action that in turn repre-

sents history-becomes the pattern of mastery

through repetition in the series of historical sec-

tions to follow. Section 3, a single sentence, de-

scribes the lilac bush in rhythms that are closer

to speech than any previous lines are. Whitman's

reference to the "perfume strong I love" con-

nects the lilac bush to the "thought of him I

love." Thus, when the description of the luxuri-

ant lilac bush "with delicate-color'd blossoms

and heart-shaped leaves of rich green" is

abruptly broken off in the last line-"A sprig

with its flower I break"-the violence done to

the lilac takes us back to the violence done to

Lincoln. The poet reenacts the violence both

when he cuts off the natural life of the flower

and when he tells us about the act, for behind

sprig is the ghost of the present-progressive end-

ing ing that predominates in the description of

the lilac bush. The continuity of nature, which is

"unconscious," is alien to human beings and can

always be violated by them. The breaking of the

sprig-the word also looks like a truncated

spring-to deck a coffin announces the separa-

tion from nature of the poet, who partakes of

human fate and social history. Moreover, the

series of long, conversational lines proliferating

through repeated phrases ends in the short, in-

verted line "A sprig with its flower I break," and

O powerful western fallen star!

this abrupt shift in rhythm and syntax suggests

O shades of night-O moody, tearful night!

the complicity of language in the divorce from

O great star disappear'd-O the black murk that

nature. Art is imitation: words and their orders

hides the star!

can imitate natural continuity and its rupture,

for the very use of words represents a break in

Yet the utterance is so rhetorical that it amounts

to another evasion of the present. According to

James E. Miller, Jr., the "0" that opens all the

lines in this section is "a vivid visual representa-

tion of the protagonist's grief (the letter suggests

the inevitable shape of the mouth in expressing

great pain)" (p. 112). Yet this is also the Shake-

spearean "O," and its use is dramatic and liter-

the natural flow of time. Thus the breaker of the

lilac sprig is both a human being and a poet, and

in this section the poet shifts his focus from na-

ture to history as he assumes responsibility for

his role in bringing death to life.

When Whitman links mimetic language use to

the historical violence, he moves beyond conven-

tion. In Milton's lines in "Lycidas,"

ary. It is a highly stylized, abstract representa-

tion, which is out of time and almost imperYet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more,

sonal: the poet wears the mask of tragedy, and

Ye Myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,

the present still eludes him.

I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,

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34

Whitman's "Lilacs" and the Grammars of Time

And with forced fingers rude

ing the assassination in his nation's history and

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year,

geography. In Section 5, for example, he de-

scribes a landscape in images of life springing from

the breaking of natural continuity parallels the

friend's death "ere his prime." Thus these lines

death, but he rounds off the section with the

figure of the coffin. As in Section 3, the short last

suggest that the consolation of the poem will lie

line contrasts with the expansive lines depicting

in the reestablishing of natural continuity. Whit-

the spring landscape, and the shift in rhythm

man's self-conscious use of this convention,

reinforces the sense of discontinuity. Yet the

however, points to the inappropriateness, for

him, of the conventional-natural consolation. Un-

like Milton's "uncouth swain," Whitman's

speaker is a self-conscious user of language who,

grammatical function of the last line as the con-

clusion of the periodic sentence makes the coffin

continuous with nature. The syntax doubles as

meaning, and historical discontinuity is repeated

as he realizes in Section 3, is responsible for

and mastered in narrative and syntactical con-

history. His consolation will have to be found in

tinuity. As narrative, this ordering accommo-

language and history rather than in convention

dates the violence of the assassination, and as

and nature, for both the order of nature and the

continuity of national history are broken in

"Lilacs."

syntax it redeems the poet's words and his com-

plicity as a user of language in the violence of

history.

Yet language generates solutions as it gener-

ates problems, for the echo of spring in sprig

calls forth sing. The solution of escaping words

In these sections of what have been called

"continental" sentences (Allen and Davis, p.

232), grammar and narrative function like the

altogether or of purging them of their complicity

public ceremony of the funeral. Just as the

in violence is suggested by the introduction of

funeral train headed for Illinois united the coun-

the thrush who "sings by himself a song":

try in its wake, the sentence winding through the

landscape unites life and death as it passes on to

end in its own fated death. Writing, then, transSong of the bleeding throat,

Death's outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I

know,

If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely

forms time into history. Syntax formalizes tem-

poral experience into beginnings and endings,

pauses, repetitions, pasts and futures. Only then

die.)
does death become "sane." In the ritualistic Sec-

tions 5 and 6, the coffin, the lilac, and the poet-

The thrush's song is attractive, for it promises

history, nature, and language-are triumphantly

the poet atonement. It is a kind of suicide-the

integrated, and the mimic assassination is mas-

bliss of the "bleeding throat"-to atone for a

kind of assassination-the violence of language

in Section 3. Such private atonement could offset

tered in the mimic funeral. Thus the lilac sprig,

the symbol of the rupture of history and nature,

now symbolizes their wholeness: "Copious I

the public guilt taken on oneself, just as the re-

break, I break the sprigs from the bushes, / With

cessive music would mitigate the temporal ag-

loaded arms I come, pouring for you, / . . .

gression of language. Yet the poet resists the

death." With "Blossoms and branches green to

solution of the "hermit" thrush in "the secluded

recesses," because it is another escape from his-

tory, as the uncharacteristic archaisms in the

address indicate.

coffins all I bring," the poet masters the "trinity

sure you bring" (emphasis mine) and emerges

all-powerful as a user of language.

Similarly, the poet can accept the "fall" of the

Accepting his involvement in history-an in-

star when he narrates it in a sentence that imi-

volvement that his narrative syntax in the previ-

tates the natural course and sinking of the star.

ous sections projected-the poet turns to a

Although Whitman never tells us what the star

representation of the funeral, itself a public and

historical dramatization invoking the return of

meant to say to him, the very shape of the sen-

tence is the sentence's meaning: the star "con-

order and continuity. In a series of single-

cluded" its statement because its message was its

sentence narrative sections, the poet imitates and

cycle or period. Thus the poet and the star be-

thereby reestablishes continuity, eventually plac-

come "comrades" in the words of this sentence;

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Mutlu Konuk Biasing

they travel the same periodic course and eventu-

ally become identified, for it is the soul that

"sinks" and the star that "concludes." This iden-

tification is borne out by the gradual transforma-

tion of the stylized "0" of grief into the present

acceptance of "know," which reinforces the

poet's verbal mastery: "O western orb sailing

the heaven, / Now I know . . ." (emphasis

mine). He replaces the helpless fragments of

Section 2 with complete sentences and syntax,

which fit natural phenomena back into their cy-

cles or periods. Thus the periodic, narrative sen-

tences round off, complete, and order natural as

well as temporal periods. The poet can now

make his final funeral offering, accept the "sink-

ing" of the sun, and welcome the darkness:

35

Leaves of Grass, p. 115). The hermit thrush,

who has been repeatedly pushed into the back-

ground, now "receives" the "comrades three"-

the trinity of death that is the personal version of

the opening "trinity sure."

The bird's carol, "tallied" by the poet's soul,

is distinctive, for it is the most regular poetry in

"Lilacs." When the poet translates the purely

natural notes of the bird, he produces the most

conventional and "literary" passage in the poem.

Divided into four-line stanzas, the song makes

use of repetition, contains some end rhymes and

many internal rhymes, and concludes with an

elegiac hexameter line: "I float this carol with

joy, with joy to thee O death." In contrast to the

earlier historical-narrative sentences, the carol

transpires in the eternal present of the lyric. Fol-

The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and

lowing Whitman's description of the carol as

the stars,
"victorious," as "death's outlet song of life,"

Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

many readers regard the carol as representing

Whitman's final position that the music of poetry

The public phase of the poem is over: Lincoln is

transcends death.8 Yet the lyric-a music both

placed in his funeral chamber decorated with

natural and conventional-bypasses the history

"pictures of growing spring and farms and

of the "tallier," and Whitman immediately sug-

homes," and history and nature have been re-

gests the inadequacy of this music in the face of

united in harmony.

the night. "Loud and strong kept up the gray-

brown bird," Whitman writes, "Loud in the

pines and cedars dim," its "pure deliberate notes

In its second major movement, the poem

faces the personal crisis triggered by the assassi-

nation and presents the poet's confrontation

with death: "And I knew death, its thought, and

the sacred knowledge of death." This personal

knowledge casts its own shadow over the spring

spreading filling the night" and sounding over

the "silent night," the "hiding receiving night

that talks not" (emphasis mine). The music

plays up the silent night, and the poet's eyes

"unclose" to "long panoramas of visions."

These revelations are recounted in the past tense

landscape. For when the poet turns inward, the

as a counterpoint to the "timeless" present of

"scenery" indeed becomes "unconscious," and

the reconciliation offered by the interwoven

images of life and death in the preceding narra-

tive orders becomes merely literary. Accord-

ingly, the poet leaves the April countryside be-

the lyric: "I saw battle-corpses, myriads of

them, / And the white skeletons of young men, I

saw them." And these visions of death are si-

lent: "I saw as in noiseless dreams . . ." Beyond

the timeless consolations of music, death and

hind: "I fled forth to the hiding receiving night

silent suffering remain, and the urgent repetition

that talks not." The night and the swamp he

flees to are the negative of the sunlit farmlands

that the coffin journeys through. They represent

of "I saw" suggests that they cannot be evaded.

In describing the song, Whitman tells us more

precisely why he must pass beyond it:

more than the intrusion of death into a season of

growth; they are the unsocial country to which

Victorious song, death's outlet song, yet varying

all travelers return. Whitman finally confronts

ever-altering song,

the "real reality"-as he calls it elsewhere-that

As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising

waits hiding in the "shifting forms of life" and

and falling, flooding the night,

that will one day "take control of all" and "last

Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and

very long" ("Scented Herbage of My Breast,"

warning, and yet again bursting with joy.

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36

Whitman's "Lilacs" and the Grammars of Time

While the carol offers an acceptance of death,

For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and

lands-and this for his dear sake,

the form-a highly controlled, well-modulated

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my

temporal composition-escapes the kind of time

soul,
that kills, as the contrasting silent visions imply.

There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk

In a telling description of the function of music,

and dim.

Whitman writes:

I want that tenor, large and fresh as the creation,

This list claims no greater order and relation

the orbed parting of whose mouth shall lift over my

among the phenomena than spatial and temporal

head the sluices of all the delight yet discovered for

contiguity on the page. Whitman abandons the

our race.-I want the soprano that lithely overleaps

orders of narrative, just as he relinquishes for-

the stars, and convulses me like the love-grips of her

mal music: the stanza is a sentence fragment

in whose arms I lay last night . . . dilating me

with an infinitive, which indicates no particular

beyond time and air . . . calmly sailing me all day

time. The effect is one of temporal immediacy.

on a bright river with lazy slapping waves-

stabbing my heart with myriads of forked distrac-

tions more furious than hail or lightning-lulling

me drowsily with honeyed morphine-tightening

Narrative and lyric time are both mediated

times, periods that project other periods, and the

time they displace in the reader's history-their

the fakes of death about my throat, and awakening

experienced duration-does not coincide with

me again to know by that comparison, the most

the time they represent. The lines of the final

positive wonder in the world, and that's what we

fragment, however, transpire in our time. Their

call life.9

fiction is not distinguishable from the time they

displace. In other words, their fiction is the time

Thus music "fakes" life and death in order,

they create and make conscious: the breath of

Whitman claims, to return us to that "positive

the poet's chant, his saying these words, coin-

wonder," real life-time and air, here and now.

cides with our breath reading these words. The

In the same way, the bird's song functions as a

unredeemed linearity of a list and the unfinished

vehicle. It is ultimately a foreign tongue-an inperiod of a sentence fragment place the lines in

human tongue-and Whitman chose, in revising

an experienced present-our present, which al-

the poem, to underscore this fact by italicizing

most leaves the poet behind. Moreover, in the

the carol.10 The song serves only to awaken us,

final stanza Whitman rejects the symbolism of

"by that comparison," to the human tonguethe poem, which had also served him as an es-

the translator and his own "song of the bleeding

cape from the present. In the telegraphic "Lilac

throat," the words tallying music and silence.

and bird and star twined with the chant of my

Accordingly, the final section of the poem besoul," the terms of the trinity are more words

gins with the poet "passing" beyond all that he

than symbols; words as symbols give way to

has experienced in the poem. And the last stanza

words as human breath marking time and mak-

is crucial: it is what remains. Whitman repeats

ing sense.

the main figures of the poem yet again and preUntil the last stanza, the action of the poem

sents them as "retrievements out of the night":

has been represented on various stages. The poet

mourns his loss on a well-defined natural stage

Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the

with the lilacs, the star, and the bird; the coffin

night,
travels through a painted landscape; the cere-

The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown

monious funeral is a staged ritual; and the bird's

bird,

song is "tallied," or re-presented. The closing

And the tallying chant, the echo arous'd in my soul,

lines, however, have no such representational

With the lustrous and drooping star with the coun-

layering. They do not even represent emotion;

tenance full of woe,

they represent themselves-or unmediated

With the holders holding my hand nearing the

speech in unmediated time. Thus style escapes

call of the bird,

its shadow, rhetoric. In contrast to the rhetorical

Comrades mine and I in their midst, and their

memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so

well,

opening lines, the final lines embody the pure

Whitman cadences of the tongue translating si-

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Mutlu Konuk Biasing

lence into words, of speech retrieving experience

in language. If there is a stage now, it is not

"outside" the poem, as the stage of a narrative

is; it is not even the poem itself, as in a lyric. It

is, instead, the reader: the "delicatest ear of the

mind" has replaced the set stage and the actors

on it. If one forgoes a fictional or representa-

tional "stage," however, one has no protection

from silence, which moves in as the words ex-

37

as, in the deepest sense, I consider our American

republic itself to be, with its theory" ("A Back-

ward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads," Leaves of

Grass, pp. 562-63). When the practice seemed

to fail the theory, Whitman fell back on form:

"O Captain! My Captain!" is a double funeral

for the death of both experiments. "Lilacs,"

however, is energized by the struggle between

the poet who writes lines like "for well dear

pire. The last section starts and develops in the

brother I know, / If thou wast not granted to

present, but it is slowly invaded by the past.

sing thou would'st surely die" and the poet who

Without the fictional "here" of the lyric, we

leave the poet "there," as the lights dim and go

always insisted that his work was significant only

insofar as it was unconventional, with no "stock

out.
ornamentation . . . no legend, or myth, or ro-

mance, nor euphemism, nor rhyme" ("A Back-

ward Glance," p. 564). In "Lilacs," Whitman

Conventional grammatical and poetic struc-

moves beyond taking refuge in conventions or in

tures like meter, rhyme, and stanza serve for-

the authority of authorship, which is formalized

mally to separate the domains of sound and si-

in poetic usage and syntax. In the final stanza,

lence, meaning and loss of meaning, temporal

his rejection of the orders of a sentence indicates

orders and time itself; as such, they counter

his psychic mastery of the event that occasioned

fears of disorder and death. The revision of

the poem. He gives us yet another open-ended

"Lilacs" suggests that Whitman himself had first

catalog and shows himself equal to the demands

to overcome such fears of chaos, for the original

of national experience. Just as in "Song of My-

version of the poem reveals the attractions that

self" he masters the fantastic reality and chaotic

formal music had for Whitman. To begin with,

fluidity of America, he responds in "Lilacs" to

he does not set off the bird's song in italics and

the challenge of his country's violence and ter-

explicitly pass beyond it. In addition, he presents

rorism. The "impossible possible" project is

the final renunciation of conventional poetic

affirmed once again, even if it later leaves him

usage as a painful sacrifice:

musing, "Strange, (is it not?) that battles, mar-

tyrs, agonies, blood, even assassination, should

Must I leave thee, lilac with heart-shaped leaves?

Must I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming,

so condense-perhaps only really, lastingly con-

dense-a Nationality" ("Death of Abraham

returning with spring?

Lincoln," p. 508).

Must I pass from my song for thee?11

The grammatical opening up of the conclud-

ing lines formally expresses not only a political

Moreover, Whitman does not end the original

but a personal mastery. Just as renouncing the

version with a sentence fragment. Certainly the

hierarchical orders of narrative and syntax rep-

violence of the experience Whitman is writing

resents a mastery of threats of political chaos,

about would justify his initial fears. Indeed, the

Whitman's relinquishing of conventional music

only completely formal poem-with a rhyme

suggests a mastery of fears of personal disorder.

scheme, meter, and stanzaic regularity-in the

Frank O'Hara, who acknowledged Whitman as

entire Leaves of Grass is another poem about

his "great predecessor," once said about his own

Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!" As F. O.

work, "I don't believe in god, so I don't have to

Matthiessen observes, "In this period of his most

make elaborately sounded structures."13 Whit-

intense feeling Whitman also reverted to the

man seems to make the same connection be-

hackneyed cadences and imagery of his first

tween belief and form when he moves away

newspaper verse in producing 'O Captain! My

from hierarchical orders; he does not believe in

Captain!' "12 Whitman himself gives the clue to

what triggered this exception: "I consider

'Leaves of Grass' and its theory experimental-

a given immortality, so he must abandon his

elaborate structure and return to time. Even

those who read "Lilacs" as a traditional elegy

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38

Whitman's "Lilacs" and the Grammars of Time

are forced to admit that the poem contains no

ternatives, for the death it accepts is the human

explicit affirmation of immortality (Chase, p.

death the poet and his speech bring into the

world.

144; Adams, p. 486). The absence of such

affirmation determines the formal movement of

Yet the final lines of the poem do achieve a

the poem.
transcendence. The overwhelming sense of

It is also this absence that distinguishes the

human speech, as night and silence redouble to

experiment of "Lilacs" from Whitman's earlier

retrieve the words, awakens us not to the poet's

work. In "Song of Myself," for example, his re-

time but to our time, to what Wallace Stevens

calls

jection of "elaborately sounded structures" and

the fictions of articulation only points beyond his

own rhetoric to the "rhetoric" of nature; ad-

The present close, the present realized,

Not the symbol but that for which the symbol

dressing his "speech," Whitman writes:

stands,

The vivid thing in the air that never changes,

... you conceive too much of articulation,

Though the air change.14

Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath

you are folded?

Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,

The very inadequacy of words in the face of the

The dirt receding before my prophetical screams....

silent night is their eloquence, the eloquence not

(Leaves of Grass, p. 55)

of the rhetorician, historian, or singer but of

human speech. The exorcism of the thrush's

For even in this passage the poet who rejects the

evasions of articulation still relies on the evasion

music frees the human voice, and the pure word

use to which Whitman means to reduce the

of metaphor-the inclusive metaphor of "leaves

poem projects in turn another kind of subdued

of grass"-which projects the fiction of natural

music. The stanza closes with traces of the

continuity, the grandest of fictions. Thus the

poet whose words naturally spring from the

ground is, in a sense, always already dead; if we

want him, we know where to look-under our

"boot-soles." And yet in a poem like "Out of the

elegiac rhythm, for it, too, is an elegy-now not

for Lincoln but for the human speaker who in-

troduces time into the world's silence. Thus the

closing fragment necessarily achieves another

level of articulation: it amounts to a redefinition

Cradle Endlessly Rocking" Whitman relin-

of poetry as the basic and fatal transformation

quishes the fiction of natural immortality only to

of the world into word, which, in Heidegger's

succumb to the fiction of natural mortality, or

terms, is "the real conversation, which we our-

death worship, chanting the inhuman, irre-

selves are."15

ducible, and ultimately meaningless syllable that

nature whispers to him: "Death, death, death,

death, death." "Lilacs" moves beyond these al-

Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

Notes

1 See, e.g., Gay Wilson Allen, The New Walt Whitmore complex way than is usual with him" (p. 118).

man Handbook (New York: New York Univ. Press,

Finally, Charles Feidelson, Jr., in his Symbolism and

1975). Allen calls "Lilacs" Whitman's "masterpiece,"

American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,

because the symbols in this poem are "handled with a

1953), thinks "Lilacs" is Whitman's "best poem" "only

skill found nowhere else in Leaves of Grass" (p. 117).

because it does not fully live up to the theory [of

James E. Miller, Jr., in A Critical Guide to Leaves of

Grass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957), also

refers to "Lilacs" as Whitman's "masterpiece," citing

his "skillful use" of symbols and "masterful technique"

(pp. 225-26). David Daiches, in Leaves of Grass One

Hundred Years After, ed. Milton Hindus (Stanford,

Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1955), regards "Lilacs"

as "the most delicate of Whitman's major poems, using

continuous process] which it both states and illustrates."

Because Whitman has a stabilizing subject matter here,

Feidelson argues, his form is no longer "arbitrary"-

as it usually is in his other work (p. 25).

2 Malcolm Cowley, "Whitman: The Poet," New

Republic, 20 Oct. 1947, pp. 27-30. Earlier, Basil

DeSelincourt, in Walt Whitman: A Critical Study

(New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1914), judged "Lilacs"

his characteristic technique in a more restrained and a

in similar terms: "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard

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Mutlu Konuk Biasing

Bloom'd, majestic as it is, does not maintain the proud

aloofness of rhythm which never forsakes [Whitman]

39

Norton, 1968), pp. 328-37. Subsequent references are

to this edition.

at his best. Its passages of conventional melody,

verging upon sing-song, have no doubt made the dirge

more popular than it otherwise could have been .. "

7 Quoted in Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis

of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art, trans.

Eric Mosbacher (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 292.

(p. 176).

8 Indeed, readings of "Lilacs" as a traditional elegy

3 Richard Chase, for instance, finds the poem "re-

fined" with a certain "artificiality": "And if the mind

whose imprint we read on the Lincoln elegy is har-

monious and moving, it is also in danger of an

excessive refinement. It is in danger of wishing to

substitute antiseptics for the healing processes of

nature in which it cannot quite believe any more.

stop here. Richard P. Adams, for example, writes, "The

final worth of Whitman's elegy lies more than that of

most elegies . . . in the [bird's] song itself .. "

("Whitman's 'Lilacs' and the Tradition of Pastoral

Elegy," PMLA, 72 [1957], 487). Chase, who reads

"Lilacs" as a "swan song" worshiping death, also seems

to stop with the lyric (p. 145).

How else is one to account for the sterile, the really

Egyptian, atmosphere of odors, perfumes, herbage,

pine, and cedar, to say nothing of the outright lyric

worship of death itself?" (Walt Whitman Reconsidered

9 Quoted in Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer

(New York: Grove, 1955), p. 143. Whitman uses a

similar description in "Song of Myself" for the song

of a "train'd soprano":

[New York: Sloane, 1955], p. 145).

I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,

4 The final lines are generally read not as a new

Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled

statement but as a restatement only. For example,

in fakes of death,
Calvin S. Brown, in Music and Literature: A Com-

At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

parison of the Arts (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press,

And that we call Being.

1948), sees the final lines as a "restatement" of the

symbols "in much their original form, but with a great

enrichment," and concludes, "This is clearly the circular

structure of the typical musical composition rather than

the linear development of the literary work" (p. 193).

Robert D. Faner, in Walt Whitman and Opera (Phila-

delphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), regards

the final section as "the Coda, in which with con-

summate skill all the implications of the previous

sections are combined into a finale, reaching its com-

pact and eloquent conclusion in the last nine lines ..."

(p. 158). Fredrick Schyberg, in Walt Whitman, trans.

Evie Allison Allen (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,

10 The change of type, which stages an admitted

fiction within the larger fiction of a poem, is a device

Whitman uses elsewhere. For example, he italicizes the

"aria" in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" to

set it off from the rest of the poem, because it is a

conventional, stylized representation or "translation"

of the natural music that awakens the boy to his

"tongue's use," to the complex of eros, death, and lan-

guage-"the myriad thence-arous'd words," which are

indistinguishable from what "The messenger there

arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within, /The unknown

want, the destiny of me."

1951), also sees the ending as a "diminuendo in the

form of a final reiteration of the motifs of the poem"

(p. 203), as do Gay Wilson Allen and Charles T.

11 Quoted in The Poet and the President: Whitman's

Lincoln Poems, ed. William Coyle (New York: Odyssey,

1962), pp. 18-19.

Davis in their Selections with Critical Aids: Walt

Whitman's Poems (New York: New York Univ. Press,

1955), p. 233. Feidelson is an exception to this con-

12 Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Ex-

pression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New

York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), p. 618.

sensus; according to him, the true subject of the poem

is the "poetic process" itself, and the ending of the

poem returns to that activity (p. 25).

13 O'Hara, "Personism: A Manifesto," in The Col-

lected Poems of Frank O'Hara, ed. Donald M. Allen

(New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 498.

5"Death of Abraham Lincoln," in Prose Works

1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York Univ.

Press, 1964), II, 503-04, 504, 506, 507.

6"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,"

Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition, ed.

Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York:

14 Stevens, "Martial Cadenza," in The Collected

Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954),

p. 238.

15 Martin Heidegger, "Holderlin and the Essence of

Poetry," trans. Douglas Scott, in Heidegger, Existence

and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1970), p. 279.

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