When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And the thought of him I love.

-Walt Whitman

Considered by many to be Whitman’s greatest poem, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d is a reflection on the death of Abraham Lincoln.  Whitman was raised as a Quaker and thus had pacifism in his blood, yet slavery was such an abomination that he must have seen Lincoln, even in his war making, to be a great man.  Critics have observed that Lilacs is the zenith of Whitman’s poetry.  In many ways the Civil War left Whitman burned out and his mourning of Lincoln was his last and greatest shout into the gaping maw of history.  Whitman served among the wounded of the war, as a nurse, even though he was a writer of growing renown, he served faithfully and humbly: he spent his meager wages to provide the wounded with basic comforts, he helped the illiterate read and write letters, he was by all accounts a gray-bearded angel of mercy.  When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d mingles the hope and freshness of spring imagery with the procession of Lincoln’s coffin.  In the poem Whitman places sprigs of lilac on that coffin, life and death are held up against one another.

            The power of this contrast is no accident and it can be felt in our celebration of Lent and Easter.  Notice the effect that it has: as we move out of the frozen winter and into the spring we move closer to the cross.  Life and death grow more imminent in parallel courses, there is a cross looming amidst the blooming flowers and a tomb set in the side of greening hills.  The difference is the resurrection, for us the mourning ends, abruptly, on Easter morning when Christ brings us all into new, eternal life.  In Whitman’s life there was no resurrection of his sensitive nature, the part of him that was tuned into nature and the human struggle was simply over loaded and short circuited, the part of him that could write poetry was literally killed by the brutality of the world.  He is left where Mary Magdalene would have been if Jesus had not spoken her name in the garden, he throws his rain soaked lilacs on the slow moving coffin.  The Civil War sapped the poetry out of our greatest poet like it sapped the life out of thousands of families; that is the way of the world.

            But it is not the way of our God.  Jesus stepped out of that tomb into the green of the garden in the morning.  And so during Lent we may mourn but it is only a temporary condition, for we always know that the cross leads not to black silence but to a victorious burst of life, eternal life.  The trials of life: wars, illness, grief, anxiety, these things seek to make us forget that spring is indeed “ever-returning.”  But in Christ we have new life, life that breaks away from terrible counterbalance of death.  In Christ life is set free, and we who live in Him are set free as well.  Never again let death rob us of our poetry and our songs to sing, for our Lord, the one we love and who loves us, has broken the bonds of sin and loosed the chains of death.  He is risen indeed.

Grace and Peace,

Rev. Mark