Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

"When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d" by Walt Whitman (1865)

This poem is Whitman’s elegy for former President Abraham Lincoln and serves as a counterpoint to “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night.” In keeping with the subject of this later poem, Lincoln’s assassination, “Lilacs” eschews the personal quality of “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” in favor of lines creating a synecdoche—when a term for something is representative of the whole—between Lincoln’s death and that of all soldiers in the American Civil War.

"Song of Myself, 6 [A child said, What is the grass?]" by Walt Whitman (1855)

“Song of Myself, 6” reinforces some of the transcendental qualities found in “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night.” Though Whitman does not fit within the parameters of the transcendental movement, he does share those writers’ interest in creating a generative link between nature and humanity.

"Song of Myself, 49 [And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me]" by Walt Whitman (1855)

“Song of Myself, 49” illustrates Whitman’s attitude toward death, but in a more personal way than in “Vigil Strange.