When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

Whitman made anaphora a central organizing feature of his poetic style; its position at the beginning of the line tethers expansive sentences that test the margins and wrap onto the next line. Anaphora grounds Whitman’s poems in a repetition with an effect very different from the repetition in end rhyme, which contains and stops progression. Whitman’s voice expands and reaches out, rather than boxing in. But anaphora, repeated words or phrases at the beginning of each line, brings another kind of return, creating an incantatory, meditative mood in some poems, or an oracular, emphatic testimony in others.

In “Lilacs,” anaphora serves to emphasize the speaker’s sorrow, as with the repeated exclamation “O” in Canto 2. But in Canto 8, the repeated “as” creates a series of touchstones through the speaker’s recounting of an intimate memory. Each “as” takes the speaker and the reader further into the speaker’s dream-state. The repetition sustains a spell-like mood throughout the episode. The bird’s song in Canto 14 includes anaphora as well; Whitman’s choice of this literary device shows his preference for a style more suited to the sounds of nature than the stricter confines of rhyme and meter.

While metaphor projects a parallel identity to borrow connotations from one image to convey aspects of another, metonymy suggests an image or entity by representing it through a part or directly associated aspect of its identity. Metonymy underscores aspects of a particular image rather than interpreting it through analogy; it replaces the name of a thing with a term already closely associated with it, if not an actual part. Metaphor takes place on an intellectual or imaginative level while metonymy can be nearly literal.

The lilacs at Whitman’s mother’s threshold perform a function by returning Whitman and the speaker to a place of grief existing in memory. For the speaker, the lilacs function as metonymy—part of his grief that represents the entirety. Whitman’s poem makes the interaction with the lilacs, the taking in of their image and scent, a sacrament performed in remembrance, moving the entire episode to the realm of metaphor.

The “western star” repeated in the poem represents Lincoln not as a metaphor, but as a name used in association with Lincoln: “star,” leader, guiding light, patriot (associating the American “star” of its flag). Lincoln also came from the western frontier, building his public persona on his log cabin upbringing and unpretentious manner in debate and oratory. The group sighting of Venus one month earlier at Lincoln’s second inauguration secures the planet’s association with the man. Whitman’s syntactic precision makes this trope something beyond metaphor: not a poetic invention, but a revelatory understanding of a true name.