Analysis Of Walt Whitman 's ' When Lilacs Last

In “Spring and All”, Williams personifies spring, and the season takes on anthropological attributes, to change the dimension of the poem. When Williams brings up the season, he characterizes “spring” as “sluggish and dazed” (line 14-15). He uses these attributes to describe the season in order to personify the spring season, in order to make it more relatable to the reader. Williams’ poem is personified again, in a way that defines the cyclical nature of plant life. Williams describes plants as entering “the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter” (line 16-18) therefore comparing plants to human babies by using the words “naked” and “uncertain”. The use of these keywords furthers his intention for the reader to relate directly with the natural realm. He spends a significant amount of detail in defining the characteristics of dead plants. This image is significant to the poem, as leads us to knowing that winter is truly exanimate and cold. In the context of the entire poem, it tells us that there has to be a death in order for a new life to

Poems are like snowflakes. While no two are the same, they all have common structures and themes. One prevalent theme in poetry is that of death, which is present in both “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. Dickinson perceives death as a gentleman, while Frost perceives death as loneliness, which provides insight on how the time periods of the poems, the genders of the authors, and the authors’ personal experiences influence literature.

"This is the meal pleasantly set . . . . this is the meat and drink for natural hunger."

This is significant because it emphasizes the melancholy and mournfulness that he depicts with imagery in the first stanza. Later on in the second stanza, he author describes the tree the narrator would have planted as a “green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs”. The author uses visual color imagery of the color green to describe the sapling in order to emphasize just how young the newborn was when he died. Later on in the poem, the narrator speaks of himself and his brothers kneeling in front of the newly plated tree. The fact that they are kneeling represents respect for the deceased. When the narrator mentions that the weather is cold it is a reference back to the first stanza when he says “of an old year coming to an end”. Later on in the third stanza the author writes “all that remains above earth of a first born son” which means that the deceased child has been buried. They also compare the child to the size of “a few stray atoms” to emphasize that he was an infant. All of these symbols and comparisons to are significant because they are tied to the central assertion of remembrance and honoring of the dead with the family and rebirth.

Walt Whitman’s poem “This Compost” utilizes incestuous allusions to communicate a mood of revulsion, that is at once wondering and terrified at the ability of Mother Earth and her humans to turn death and decaying forms into provisions for life. By forming an incsestous relationship with the natural world, Whitman displays his belief that a perverse relationship with the Earth is what yields the food that humans need to survive. Furthermore, he shows that human’s relationship to the Earth is unbounded by conventional morals like the taboo against incest. The speaker’s terror comes from the perverse, yet eternally loving relationship that other men seem to disregard with their need to waste and decay the natural gifts; given to them for their own industry and agriculture.

The time of Romanticism brought upon many trends extending from the idea of individualism as a rebellious separation from the classics, an idealistic outlook and finally to a strong religious base. Most of the writers of the Romantic period followed Pantheism "God is everything and everything is God ... the world is either identical with God or in some way a self-expression of his nature" (Owen 1971: 74). The idea of Pantheism was that everything in the world worked in unity. In some of the works of the Romantic period the expression of nature and humans are not separate entities, but one in the same. Even though in reality it did not work this way Pantheism was the ideal of most these writers and idealism in itself was yet another trend

Leaves of Grass is Walt Whitman’s life legacy and at the same time the most praised and condemned book of poetry. Although fearful of social scorn, there are several poems in Leaves of Grass that are more explicit in showing the homoerotic imagery, whereas there are several subtle – should I say “implicit” – images woven into the fabric of the book. It is not strange, then, that he created many different identities in order to remain safe. What Whitman faced in writing his poetry was the difficulty in describing and resonating manly and homosexual love. He was to find another voice of his, a rhetoric device, and his effort took two forms: simplified, and subverted word play.

The poem “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” is a poem about a women who has lost her husband of thirty five years. Williams writes in the voice of a grieving woman instead of in his own voice. Now that her husband has died, the widow cannot find joy in her yard that she used to love. The widow may even be considering suicide. Williams, writing in free verse, writes a metaphor comparing the grief of a widow to her blooming yard in the springtime setting a tone of great sadness for the widow.

Song of Myself by Walt Whitman. In this poem, the speaker Walt Whitman talks about his connection to nature and how everything is connected to nature. He speaks as if what he says is a new or unheard language. Mr. Whitman believe that he is not tamed from himself and that he has transcended the notion. By that he means he have created a new language that is foreign to others since they have never heard of it. Around this time many poets were becoming more expressive and open. Walt Whitman motivated many artists that would have been considered “weird” during the time to become more open.

The epiphany surrounding the word "death" seems appropriate, for in other poems of Whitman's we have seen death described as the ultimate tool for democracy and sympathy. Here death is shown to be the one lesson a child must learn, whether from nature or from an elder. Only the realization of death can lead to emotional and artistic

Individualism is important. This statement is made clear in Walt Whitman’s book, Leaves of Grass, published in 1855. Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection composed in the nineteenth-century, during the Westward Expansion. Contrary to popular poetic style in that period, Whitman wrote in free-verse, meaning there was little to no rhyming or tempo. Individualism is a theme that sets the tone of Whitman’s poems. Whitman uses the literary devices of repetition, asyndeton, imagery, and conflict to create the idea of individualism to set the tone.

John Ashbery’s poem “Flowering Death” is a wonderfully confusing poem about flowers, bad odors, and–unsurprisingly–death. The poem is written in an esoteric, roundabout fashion so that in order to extrapolate the true meaning from it, one must delve deep into the text. Ashbery uses vaguery, contradictions, and a breakdown of our societal beliefs to discuss mortality and the human condition. Ashbery speaks to an unknown individual about an unknown entity.

In Walt Whitman’s collection of Leaves of Grass, he includes many poems that are a compilation of his musings and thoughts. One thing that he does throughout his collection is that he creates goals through each poem to get different messages across. Some of his common messages, or underlying themes, are the Self, democracy, and the individual, but an interesting common theme found scattered throughout Leaves of Grass is the cycle of life and death, especially in comparison to the United States, the Civil War, and life itself. In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” does such thing. Published in 1865, the pastoral elegy was written after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. This is the best way that Walt Whitman mourns a beloved public figure in his own modern world, and also the way he copes with the natural world. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” best captures Whitman’s notion what it means to be human: the common understanding of the never-ending cycle of life and death through the form of the elegy, the symbol of the lilac, and the personification of death.

In Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night, the reader is able to discover the adoption of political authority and of the military by Walt Whitman. This appropriation is full of romanticism and regeneration when the author not only becomes the voice of mourning, but eventually has the power to resurrect the dead. This work by Whitman brings together what would be a personal account about a soldier’s passing in the field of battle to an indissoluble intimacy between two human beings at the time of death (“When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day, One look I but gave which your dear eyes return'd with a look I shall never forget, One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground.”). The vigil is reached as a consequence of the battle, and the body the narrator looks upon with love and tenderness reminds him of his own escape from

This causes the poetic persona to realize that her father wants to die earlier. This is shown, through the phrase, “there are leaves still on the trees". This symbolizes that the father wants to die earlier, he wants to die during the fall time rather than winter. The poetic persona continues expressing her fathers acceptance of death through the use of a winking light. The winking light symbolizes the fathers heart monitor in the hospital. Light is used to represent life. Since the fathers light is winking, he does not have much life left in him. This means he is ready to die. As the poem comes to an unsettling ending, the poetic persona mentions “an unopened present”, this phrase has two possible meanings to it. The first one being, that the present is seen as gift therefore making the future an unopened gift. The poetic persona sees the future as an unopened gift because she does not know what the future holds without her father. She is having a hard time coming to terms with her father passing. The second meaning is that she sees her father as a gift that she has not fully appreciated