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Walt WhitmanA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
From the first line of the first canto, the speaker of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” identifies lilacs as the place marker for his grief. As a perennial, lilacs return every year to remind the speaker of his loss, forever altering the meaning of spring. No longer a reminder of life and renewal, spring now marks a violent anniversary. Even in the speaker’s grief, though, he takes consolation that the lilacs also provide a visceral reminder of his lost friend. The poem’s focus on natural imagery—the lilac’s fragrance and their “heart-shaped leaves of rich green” (Canto 2, Lines 2 and 5)—celebrates the speaker’s ability to transport back to a particular emotional place—even a sorrowful one—in remembrance. This transformative experience in the terrain of observation, correspondence, and art furnishes the poem’s central themes.
Lilacs grew outside the door to Whitman’s mother’s home. Whitman learned of Lincoln’s assassination while visiting his mother, so the lilacs can be seen as a literal representation of Whitman’s experience.
By Walt Whitman
A Glimpse
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America
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A Noiseless Patient Spider
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Are you the new person drawn toward me?
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As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days
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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
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For You O Democracy
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Hours Continuing Long
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I Hear America Singing
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I Sing the Body Electric
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I Sit and Look Out
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Leaves of Grass
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O Captain! My Captain!
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Song of Myself
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Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night
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When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
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