April 15– “Oh Captain my Captain” and “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d” Walt Whitman (1865) (M is for Memorial)

For my money, the better scene from Dead Poet's Society

April 15– “Oh Captain my Captain” and “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d” Walt Whitman (1865)

Summary: Lincoln is dead, and Whitman is sad.

Commentary: I think I knew that Lincoln died on "the ides of April" but I didn't remember it until I looked at the readings for today. If only we'd had this Friday so I could've had L for Lincoln. M for Memorial is an easy enough fit.

Can we take a minute to appreciate the fact that the "default" picture of Whitman they usually put on flaps is clearly a grandpa going to LARP as a wizard?

Thanks Wikipedia

Here he is as a younger man:

Again, Wikipedia

He still looks like a wizard, just a trickster one who uses magic to cheat at card games. Look at that jaunty hat cock!

Whitman has a line about "Manhattan with Spires" which led me to lookup the NYC skyline over the years. 

These pieces are great proof of the "poetry is meant to be read aloud" rule. On paper, they're a little slow and dense, but you can find tons of great recordings of them easily, and they take on a lot more vigor.

Whitman wrote two other "Lincoln Poems" which weren't included in the selection, but I've appended in the reading doc. Of the four, "O Captain!" is the most famous. It's the most energetic and fairly conventional, so no surprise there. "The Dust..." is a fairly conventional short epitaph. "When Lilacs..." is the heaviest lift, and could probably stand to be trimmed a bit (being around three times as long as than the other three combined) but still a strong poem with some solid repetition, good lines, etc. I think I like Stanza 15 the best:

To the tally of my soul,

Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,

With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.

Loud in the pines and cedars dim,

Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,

And I with my comrades there in the night.

While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,

As to long panoramas of visions.

And I saw askant the armies,

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,

Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I saw them,

And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,

And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence),

And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,

And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,

I saw the débris and débris of all the slain soldiers of the war,

But I saw they were not as was thought,

They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,

The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,

And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,

And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.

Great use of repetition.

I don't think it's a hard argument that "Hush'd Be The Camps Today" is the gem of the lot though. It's more personal than the others, sorrowful, without being overbearing. 

Hush'd be the camps to-day,

And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,

And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,

Our dear commander's death.

No more for him life's stormy conflicts,

Nor victory, nor defeat—no more time's dark events,

Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.

But sing poet in our name,

Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.

As they invault the coffin there,

Sing—as they close the doors of earth upon him—one verse,

For the heavy hearts of soldiers.