When Lylacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

The other day I read this poem by Walt Whitman expressing his feelings in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's death. Whitman uses imagery which corporate nature, the horrors of the Civil War, and even
the journey Lincoln's body took from D.C. to its final restingplace in Springfield, Illinois. "Coffin that passes
through lanes and streets, through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land...with the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces, with dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn...here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac." The perceding quote from the poem truly epitomizes the focus of Whitman's text. He describes the eerie, unsettling scene of Lincoln's
coffin passing through some American city or town on its way to the train depot to be transported to the next
destination on its way to Springfield. Even as processions of mourners follow the coffin that holds the beloved president, Whitman talks poignantly of placing a lilac on the coffin. I enjoyed reading this poem because it used beautiful language and long phrases to speak of what was occuring in the scene. Though the phrasing was difficult to understand at times and I wasn't able to grasp the poem's whole meaning, it was put together in such a songlike manner I didn't mind that I wasn't able to completely comprehend it. Besides, some pieces of literature are just too in-depth to completely understand in one reading. In fact, some pieces of literature, particularly poems, can have a myriad of meanings. Even though the poem focuses on Whitman's grief following Lincoln's death, there are other things we can pull from this work. In section fifteen Whitman talks about the horrors of war and how those who died on the battlefield were the fortunate ones, to have escaped their world of suffering, while their mothers, children, and war comrades were forced to continue the suffering of this world still awhile longer. This seems to connect to the previous section where Whitman seems to be praising death: "Approach strong deliveress, when it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead, lost in the loving floating ocean of thee, laved in the flood of thy bliss O death."