O Captain! My Captain! Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman

Early on the morning of August 12, 1864, poet Walt Whitman watches from his Washington, DC home as President Abraham Lincoln travels from the Old Soldier’s Home to the White House for a day’s work. Whitman would go on to write, not one, but two great poems about our 16th President.

The Old Soldier’s Home, now called President Lincoln’s Cottage, was a respite from the mosquito-infested swamps abutting the Executive Mansion. The heat, humidity, and pestilence drove the Lincoln family about three miles north of the White House each summer beginning in 1862. Mary, despondent over the death of son Willie, likely from typhoid caused by well water polluted from the tens of thousands of soldiers and horses dumping waste upstream of the open sewer that was the Potomac River, desperately needed a change of locale. Lincoln himself needed a breather after days spent besieged by office seekers, inventors, and crackpots lined up for their turn to imping upon the President’s time. He would travel by horse or buggy each day during the summer months. Walt Whitman would watch him pass, noting that they had begun to recognize each other with a formal nod each day.

Whitman remembers:

“Mr. Lincoln . . . generally rides a good-sized, easy-going gray horse, is dress’d in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty; [and] wears a black stiff hat . . . I see very plainly [his] dark brown face, with the deep cut lines, the eyes, &c., always to me with a latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we always exchange bows, and very cordial ones.”

After Lincoln’s assassination, Walt Whitman writes a poem of mourning called “O Captain! My Captain!,” which begins:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

Whitman’s more epic effort is the poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In it Whitman never mentions Lincoln or the circumstances of his death. Instead he uses free verse in the form of an elegy, the first-person monologue lamenting death. Stretching on for 16 cantos ranging in length from five to 53 lines. Like his renowned poetry collection Leaves of Grass, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” evolved over several iterations in time to its present form. It begins:

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.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

O powerful western fallen star!

O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!

O great star disappear’d—O the 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.

And ends:

Passing the visions, passing the night,

Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,

Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,

Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,

As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,

Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,

Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,

As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,

Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,

I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.

I cease from my song for thee,

From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,

O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.

Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,

The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,

And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,

With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,

With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,

Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,

For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,

There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

[See the link for the full poem]

Lincoln would continue traveling between the Old Soldier’s Home and the White House during the summers of 1863 through 1864. Whitman continued to work as a volunteer in Washington’s Civil War hospitals, keeping wounded men company, reading to them, and acting as amanuensis. After suffering a stroke in 1873, Whitman moved to live with his brother in Camden, New Jersey, where he carried on additional revisions to Leaves of Grass until his eventual death in 1892. Throughout his life his fondest memories were of Abraham Lincoln, a man he saw many times but never actually got to know.

David J. Kent is an avid science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

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