"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

Outside the front door of almost every old New England farmhouse you can find planted a lilac bush. Lilacs have gnarled trunks of dense wood that early settlers often used as knife handles. Famously hardy, they require limited maintenance and can grow to be 15 feet high.

Although there are now a wider variety colors available, traditionally lilac flowers are pale purple, violet, or white. And their fragrance . . . ahhh, their fragrance. Redolent of honey and love and renewal, lilac flowers are among the most ambrosial of all spring flowers. Bees, hummingbirds, and lovers are all attracted to these simple plants.

Lilacs are among the first plants to bloom in the spring and as such have carved out a special place - along with crocuses and pussy willows - in the hearts of all who crave color and fragrance and the end of winter.

After a long winter, spring is a time of renewal - lilacs bloom, birds chirp, and you can smell the fecundity of the earth - and so it is especially disorienting when spring also brings with it profound memories of loss and grief and mourning.

When I was teaching American Lit, spring time was when I usually taught poetry. I felt that the genre was especially well-suited for adolescents in the spring, for the passions and sensualities of poetry echo the transitions of the natural world and the re-awakenings of vitality after a long winter slumber. But spring can also be cruel.

Every time I taught Walt Whitman, I was reminded not only of the exuberance of life Whitman captures in his passionate and profane "Leaves of Grass" but also of the devastating loss captured by his pastoral elegy for Abraham Lincoln in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," the first two stanzas of which read as follows:

"When lilacs last in the door-yard 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.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring; Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love."

In these first stanzas of Whitman's lament for Lincoln, he associates two symbols with his memories of Lincoln: the blooming of lilacs and Venus dropping into the western horizon. (Lincoln was assassinated on April 15th, which is when Venus droops low in the western sky.) And every spring, when lilacs bloom and Venus hangs low in the west, Whitman is flooded by memories of Lincoln and his heroic shepherding of America through the violent chaos of the Civil War.

In the aftermath of the recent tragedy of the 32 Virginia Tech students senselessly gunned down by a troubled sociopath, I have found myself reflecting on Whitman's elegy. Although I find the suffering that occurred in Blacksburg to be almost incomprehensible, I am struck by the incongruous contrast of the violence perpetrated upon innocents with the affirmation of vitality promised by spring, exactly the tension Whitman expresses in his threnody.

It doesn't seem right or fair that any life be cut short. And yet it happens. It doesn't seem fair or right that death should come in the spring. And yet it happens. It doesn't seem right or fair that tragedy should intrude itself on a campus dedicated to the idealistic pursuit of knowledge and beauty. And yet it happened.

I cannot reconcile these bittersweet tensions. The fact is that life too often juxtaposes death and sorrow with vitality and celebration. The best I can, the best we can do, is to celebrate when I can and to mourn when it is appropriate.

And so I will continue to celebrate lilacs for their fragrant beauty and for their promise of renewal. But lilacs will also continue to remind me of the loss of those who have died undeservedly, tragically, suddenly.

--Steve McKibben
4/22/07