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Here Captain! Dear father

The arm beneath your head!

It is some dream that on the deck,

You’ve fallen cold and dead.35

In the third of these 1865 poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman speaks as himself, of his own efforts to grapple with Lincoln’s loss. The president’s assassination is not explicitly mentioned; it is as if there is no need to specify the tragedy that occurred when lilacs last bloomed, for it is both known and common to all. The experiences of mourning have been shared as the coffin has journeyed “night and day” across the land. Like a series of photographs, the poem captures this experience, rendering the seventeen-hundred-mile funeral procession in scenes of lingering visual power.

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,

Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,

…….….….….….….…..

With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,

With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,

With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the somber faces,

With the dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn…36

The poem invokes no consoling Christian doctrines of immortality, and Whitman makes no reference to the pervasive contemporary imagery of Good Friday and the crucifixion. “Lilacs” suggests no promise of an afterlife beyond that of nature’s own renewal. For Whitman, immortality rested, as he wrote in another poem, in mother earth’s absorption of bodies and blood rendered “in unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence.” Dissenting from the comforting Christian redefinition of death into life, “Lilacs” embraces, in Vendler’s words, “the value of acceptance, rather than denial, of the full stop of death.” Yet for those who remain alive to mourn, death provides no full stop.

I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war….….….….….….……

They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,

The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,

And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,

And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.37

In his 1865 Lincoln poems Walt Whitman served, as he had throughout the war, as the poet not just of death but of survival, of the suffering of the not-dead. Whitman’s was the cultural work of mourning—on behalf of the nation and, in this instance, for its beloved leader. Yet he mourned, as he wrote in “Lilacs,” “not for you, for one alone.” He mourned for all the war’s slain—for the “ashes of all dead soldiers South or North,” for the “phantoms of countless lost” who “follow me ever—desert me not while I live.” Lost yet not lost, absent yet ever present, these dead, these immortal phantoms with their unrelenting demands on mourners and survivors, became in Whitman’s eyes the meaning and legacy of the war. Lincoln was but their finest exemplar.38

Perhaps the extravaganza of mourning that greeted the public commemorations of Jackson and Lincoln served in some way as a surrogate for all the funerals that citizens could not attend as their loved ones died unattended and far away. The many soldiers buried on the field received only the attention a chaplain and their harried comrades might afford, and as we have seen, tens of thousands of men were interred without either identities or ritual observances. Families fortunate enough to retrieve bodies and bring them home, however, honored their dead with services that varied according to status, circumstance, and religious affiliation. Mary Chesnut remarked that the sound of the funeral march seemed almost constant in South Carolina. Many small communities on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line found the same. In Dorset, Vermont, home of a quarry that provided thousands of tombstones for Gettysburg, 144 men volunteered and 28 died. Funerals in Dorset seemed never-ending and sometimes occurred