Post 10

Before class on Monday, I remember discussing the poem with someone else in the class. We were talking about Lincoln’s assassination and the purpose behind the poem. The person I was talking to gave great insight to the fact that we, as a generation, have yet to go through something like that. We have not gone through and mourned the death of a president. And I try to imagine how I would feel. Would I feel terribly upset? Puzzled? Would I feel as if I was left astray and abandoned by someone completely significant even though they were not someone I had a deep, personal relationship with? How do you properly mourn the life of a leading figure in our country?

Walt Whitman’s poem hits on a number of themes or emotions such as love, hope, life, despair and rebirth. And all are portrayed through the life of the lilacs. The lilacs seem to serve Whitman as a guide to deal with and accept death. Lilacs, like humans, go through the repeated cycle of life. We live, we die. But still lilacs are not humans but Whitman treats the flower as a coping mechanism and a tool into figuring out a proper way to deal with Lincoln’s death.

Was it really his death that was a big deal? Or was it the time of his death? Was America truly more upset about a man of power ceasing or the state they were left in? And maybe this is why Whitman wrote this poem. Many people said in class that the poem was difficult to read. And I agree, it was difficult to read but perhaps that was the point of the complexity and difficulty in the poem. Because death itself is not a simple subject to unfold. Many questions are left unanswered; many feelings left incapable of digesting. Yet we continously find ourselves comparing such complex things in life with something as simple as a flower.