page_title: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
section_title: "Lilac blooming perennial"
hierarchical_section_title: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd / Themes and symbolism / A trinity of symbols: "Lilac and star and bird twined" / "Lilac blooming perennial"
context_page_description: "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is a long poem written by American poet Walt Whitman as an elegy to President Abraham Lincoln. It was written in the summer of 1865 during a period of profound national mourning in the aftermath of the president's assassination on April 14 earlier that year.
  The poem, written in free verse in 206 lines, uses many of the literary techniques associated with the pastoral elegy. Despite being an expression to the fallen president, Whitman neither mentions Lincoln by name nor discusses the circumstances of his death in the poem. Instead, he uses a series of rural and natural imagery including the symbols of the lilacs, a drooping star in the western sky, and the hermit thrush; and employs the traditional progression of the pastoral elegy in moving from grief toward an acceptance and knowledge of death. The poem also addresses the pity of war through imagery vaguely referencing the American Civil War, which ended only days before the assassination.
context_section_description: According to Price and Folsom, Whitman's encounter with the lilacs in bloom in his mother's yard caused the flowers to become "viscerally bound to the memory of Lincoln's death."
  According to Gregory Eiselein: 
  Lilacs represent love, spring, life, the earthly realm, rebirth, cyclical time, a Christ figure (and thus consolation, redemption, and spiritual rebirth), a father figure, the cause of grief, and an instrument of sensual consolation.  The lilacs can represent all of these meanings or none of them.  They could just be lilacs.
caption: Lilac flowers and heart-shaped leaves
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