page_title: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
section_title: "Great star early droop'd in the western sky"
hierarchical_section_title: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd / Themes and symbolism / A trinity of symbols: "Lilac and star and bird twined" / "Great star early droop'd in the western sky"
caption_attribution_description: English: Venus reflected on the Pacific Ocean. Italiano: Fotografia del cielo notturno ripresa dalla costa. La luminosità visibile sulla destra è un residuo della luminosità solare, al tramonto. Venere è visibile al centro dell'immagine e la sua luce si riflette nell'Oceano Pacifico. Numerose altre stelle sono visibili nell'immagine. Русский: Фотография ночного неба над побережьем Тихого океана. Справа догорает вечерняя заря. В центре видны Юпитер и Венера, свет которой отражается в воде.
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: In the weeks before Lincoln's assassination, Whitman observed the planet Venus shining brightly in the evening sky. He later wrote of the observation, "Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here. The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans" In the poem, Whitman describes the disappearance of the star:
  O powerful, western, fallen star!
  
  O shades of night! O moody, tearful night!
  
  O great star disappear'd! O the black murk that hides the star! (lines 7-9)
  Literary scholar Patricia Lee Yongue identifies Lincoln as the falling star. Further, she contrasts the dialectic of the "powerful western falling star" with a "nascent spring" and describes it as a metaphor for Lincoln's death meant to "evoke powerful, conflicting emotions in the poet which transport him back to that first and continuously remembered rebellion signaling the death of his own innocence." Biographer Betsy Erkkila writes that Whitman's star is "the fallen star of America itself", and characterizes Whitman's association as "politicopoetic myth to counter Booth's cry on the night of the assassination—Sic Semper Tyrannis—and the increasingly popular image of Lincoln as a dictatorial leader bent on abrogating rather than preserving basic American liberties." The star, seemingly immortal, is associated with Lincoln's vision for America—a vision of reconciliation and a national unity or identity that could only survive the president's death if Americans resolved to continue pursuing it. However, Vendler says that the poem dismisses the idea of a personal immortality through the symbol of the star, saying: "the star sinks, and it is gone forever."
caption: Venus, Whitman's "western falling star", reflected in the Pacific Ocean
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