In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the most innovative and challenging of his Lincoln memorial poems, Whitman addresses the roles of time and memory in grief. He also explores the relationship between public, communal mourning and individual grief, recasting the ceremony and commemoration often found in public mourning within private rituals and meditation. Like Whitman’s most inventive, transgressive works, “Lilacs” expands to “contain multitudes” (“Song of Myself,” 51, Line 8) while revealing the most inward and intimate personal reflection.

The poem begins with a half-truth—or a projection. Whitman composed “Lilacs” in summer after Lincoln’s assassination, so Whitman’s address to the returning spring in Lines 4-5 of the first Canto (“trinity sure you to me you bring / Lilac blooming perennial […]”) cannot yet have happened. Whitman here imagines the spring to come, and all the future springs inevitably to come, in which the lilacs’ image and scent will likewise return him to the moment he learned of Lincoln’s death. Long before brain research quantified associations between sensory perception and memory, Whitman intentionally employed iconic and olfactory imagery as a means of preserving his love for Lincoln and the impact of the sudden loss.