Instead, he uses a series of rural and natural imagery including the symbols of the lilacs, a drooping star in the western sky (Venus), and the hermit thrush, and he employs the traditional progression of the pastoral elegy in moving from grief toward an acceptance and knowledge of death.

Written ten years after publishing the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" reflects a maturing of Whitman's poetic vision from a drama of identity and romantic exuberance that has been tempered by his emotional experience of the American Civil War.

Although Whitman did not consider the poem to be among his best, it has been compared in both effect and quality to several acclaimed works of English literature, including elegies such as John Milton's Lycidas (1637) and Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais (1821).

Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic and developed a free verse style inspired by the cadences of the King James Bible.

[4] However, it attracted praise from American transcendentalist essayist, lecturer, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, which contributed to fostering significant interest in Whitman's work.

[14] The Civil War had ended, and a few days later, on 14 April 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending the performance of a play at Ford's Theatre.

[18][23] Upon returning to Washington, Whitman contracted with Gibson Brothers to publish a pamphlet of eighteen poems that included two works directly addressing the assassination—"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain!

Literary scholar Kathy Rugoff says that "the poem...has a broad scope and incorporates a strongly characterized speaker, a complex narrative action and an array of highly lyrical images.

His poetry achieves a sense of cohesive structure and beauty through the internal patterns of sound, diction, specific word choice, and effect of association.

[50] The poem uses many of the literary techniques associated with the pastoral elegy, a meditative lyric genre derived from the poetic tradition of Greek and Roman antiquity.

"[57][58] A typical pastoral elegy contains several features, including "a procession of mourners, the decoration of a hearse or grave, a list of flowers, the changing of the seasons, and the association of the dead person with a star or other permanent natural object.

[62] Repetition is a device used by an orator or poet to lend persuasive emphasis to the sentiment, and "create a driving rhythm by the recurrence of the same sound, it can also intensify the emotion of the poem".

[63] To achieve these techniques, Whitman employs many literary and rhetorical devices common to classical poetry and to the pastoral elegy to frame his emotional response.

[64] According to Raja Sharma, Whitman's use of anaphora forces the reader "to inhale several bits of text without pausing for breath, and this breathlessness contributes to the incantatory quality".

By basing his verse in the single, end-stopped line at the same time that he fuses this line—through various linking devices—with the larger structure of the whole, Whitman weaves an overall pattern of unity in diversity.

"[22] In the summer of 1865, Whitman's friend, John Burroughs (1837–1921), an aspiring nature writer, had returned to Washington to his position at the Treasury department after a long vacation in the woods.

[75] Burroughs described the song as "the finest sound in nature...perhaps more of an evening than a morning hymn...a voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in his best moments."

"[81] Burroughs published an essay in May 1865 in which he described the hermit thrush as "quite a rare bird, of very shy and secluded habits" found "only in the deepest and most remote forests, usually in damp and swampy localities".

[83] Biographer Justin Kaplan draws a connection between Whitman's notes and the lines in the poem:[81] In the swamp in secluded recesses, A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

(lines 18–22) According to Reynolds, Whitman's first-person narrator describes himself as "me powerless-O helpless soul of me" and identifies with the hermit thrush a "'shy and hidden bird' singing of death with a "bleeding throat'".

"[88] Whitman's poetry has been set by a variety of composers in Europe and the United States although critics have ranged from calling his writings "unmusical" to noting that his expansive, lyrical style and repetition mimics "the process of musical composition".

21 (1884), a four-movement work scored for baritone and soprano soloists, chorus and orchestra,[110] likely had reached a wider audience during Whitman's lifetime than his poems.

[123] Whitman's poem appears in the opera Street Scene (1946), which was the collaboration of composer Kurt Weill, poet and lyricist Langston Hughes, and playwright Elmer Rice.

In the opera, which premiered in New York City in January 1947, the poem's third stanza is recited in song as part of the duet "Remember that I Care" at the end of the first act.

[126][127][128] The work, described as "passionate, and very American," with "a beautiful and evocative lyrical quality" using Whitman's words, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 1 February 1996.

[126][127][129] Composer George Crumb (born 1929) set the Death Carol in his 1979 work Apparition (1979), an eight-part song cycle for soprano and amplified piano.

[130] The University of California at Berkeley commissioned American neoclassical composer Roger Sessions (1896–1985) to set the poem as a cantata to commemorate their centennial anniversary in 1964.

Sessions did not finish composing the work until the 1970s, dedicating it to the memories of Civil Rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. and political figure Robert F. Kennedy, who were assassinated within weeks of each other in 1968.

[131][132] Sessions first became acquainted with Leaves of Grass in 1921 and began setting the poem as a reaction to the death of his friend, George Bartlett, although none of the sketches from that early attempt survive.

"[133] In 2004, working on a commission from the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the American composer Jennifer Higdon adapted the poem to music for solo baritone and orchestra titled Dooryard Bloom.