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.
I think of Walt Whitman’s elegy to President Abraham Lincoln each time I notice blooming lilacs in April or May. I love the poem, partnered as it is with highly aromatic and luscious purple blooms. I appreciate its minor key, reminding us that even in the face of unfolding glory, each season is tempered with its particular sadness. Spring, with its bursting blossoms and new birth cannot obscure completely what is past, what is lost.
The poem was written in 1865, just after the Civil War ended, a time when Americans were grieving their losses in that great and bloody battle. The country was deeply divided, as it is today, with proponents of slavery on one side, and those opposed far removed. Lincoln, who had grown increasingly fervent in his opposition to the institution, was elected to stand against the southern states who embraced it. Even before shots were fired at Fort Sumter, half of the country believed their president was a tyrant because of his steadfast opposition to their economies, based upon the availability of slave labor. Never before or after were Americans so divided. Or so it would seem.
Today, nearly 160 years later, some Americans are again talking and or writing about an impending civil war. There isn’t one great dividing issue as there was in Whitman’s time, but two sides, the Red and Blue, seem as far apart as the North and South in 1860. With no one huge difference between us, no one overriding contention, how is that we are again on the brink of war?
Is it that there are enough varied, yet significant, differences among us to have created this crisis of understanding? With just a short list of factors, can anyone account for our vast divide? We can all draw up our lists, including beefs from the culture wars; economic conundrums that favor some and disadvantage others; racial and gender inequality; shrinking opportunities in bordering countries that lead to mass immigration, along with other stressors brought on by our warming planet.
Could we all be suffering from the heat? Studies bear out that humans function poorly in school and on the job when it’s hot, and so it’s not surprising drivers are more rude than ever. We need look no further than the Red and Blue teams that govern us to observe how civility is waning, even among those we’ve elected to high office.
In verse two Whitman writes:
O powerful western fallen star!
Oh shades of night — O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d — O black murk that
hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless — O helpless
soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul
Bereft though he was, the poet went on in his poem to address a hermit thrush, a small singer in the shaded swamp, whose song lifts him from his depths.
Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant
from the bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and
pines.
After five years of brutal, internal strife; after the murder of its president, our country stood at a perilous crossroad. Could the North and South possibly reunite in any semblance of harmony after such a bitter, sustained effort by one side to leave the union? The future of our nation was uncertain, and our old wounds continue to fester, even today.
Perhaps Whitman’s poem was his own song, “sung from a bleeding throat.” He had lost his president, his great star. And yet.
If only we can find a way forward, to healing; to spring’s promised rebirth, when hearts swell. Lilacs bloom. Our history holds lessons: Where we have been, where we have faltered and failed. We can learn to do better going forward if we drink from its deep wellspring, rather than from hastily built, shallow wells that dot the landscape around us.
Whitman felt beauty around him, even as we do now, when headlines frighten us. We need fewer blogs and more poetry, fewer conspiracy theories and more wisdom. As did Whitman, we measure what we have to lose: Democracy as we know it, this our great star.
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