Mourning Dove

What I was caught by throughout this long poem was the constant repetition of the "gray-brown bird" and I'm pretty sure it is a mourning bird. It is a poem of mourning the passing of Abraham Lincoln, and it would be apt to use such a bird. And just in case no one knows what a mourning bird looks like:

http://www.westol.com/~banding/MODO_LU_052803a.jpg

The first time the bird is mentioned, it is in the thirteenth section. Whitman is almost pleading with this part of nature to mourn this great president. Nature, which really the president has no jurisdiction over. He does not directly effect nature, but his policies may.

It is also interesting the home of Walt Whitman is New York City. Surprisingly enough, there are mourning doves and they can be heard, so even in Whitman's home of urbanization and industrialization, this bird that he calls upon to mourn Lincoln he can call upon from the city, from his home. So in a way, it is as if no matter where any American is, he or she can mourn the loss of such a great president.

Again the bird is mentioned in the fourteenth section, and instead of a song, it is a carol that it calls out to the world. It is the last section that praises the bird and its song, for its various properties that relates it to victory, as well as to death. And death can be seen as part of the cost of victory. The mourning dove, star and flower are part of a trinity - the trinity that Whitman uses in order to mourn Lincoln - it is his private trinity.

whitman v nature

Whitman’s poem is a pastoral elegy mourning the death of President Lincoln. What I find most striking about this poem is the contrast between the mourners and nature. Throughout the poem Whitman searches for a way to grieve this great president. Whitman notices how people mourn Lincoln by going to “dim—lit churches” and singing “with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn.” Whitman hoped to commemorate Lincoln by leaving a flower at his coffin. For example, he writes, “a sprig with its flower I break.” Whitman’s breaking of the lilac symbolizes the death of Lincoln who was prematurely plucked from life. Even though Whitman spends several pages trying to mourn properly… he is still unresolved at the closing of the poem as he “leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves, I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.” The fact that he will return with spring suggests he has not found a way to cope with the death. In contrast to Whitman, nature is resolved as the poem closes with natural imagery: “There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.”

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

Lilacs are a symbol of new love and resurrection as they are annuals. Their rich green leaves, "heart-shaped" an image of a life source, are used by Whitman to highlight not only the vibrant life of spring to the death of Lincoln but also as a visual contrast to blood as red and green are on opposite side of the color wheel. Whitman also combines sounds with his visually stimulating mourning of Lincoln. Even in looking at two of the many repeted words within the poem one gains a sense of how personally affected Whitman is by the loss of Lincoln. The first prominent receptive sound is "O" in stanza two. "O" acts as a sharp cry of mourning in that it is a burst of air as if Whitman himself is in physical pain. Stanzas three, six, and eleven explore "with" as another repetition and in doing so emphasizes the very person who is not “with” the reader, Lincoln.

ode.

i enjoyed this poem. there are so many themes to be taken out of it that it seems a difficult task to fully analyze it. one passage that stood out particularly was the fifth stanza. man, as wordsworth claims, is a vessel for the divine, and he moves about the world he "trails clouds of glory...from god, who is our home..." wordsworth inverts the nature of life and death, insisting instead that our waking life here on earth is "but a forgetting" of the "heaven" that "lies about us on our infancy." he holds that man's conception of god and of immortality are not necessary illusions brought about by the presence of suffering on earth, but rather they are the elemental forces that have created our world, which is the real illusion. cast into this life, the infant and the boy will see "the glory and freshness of a dream," as the languidly of a child is compared to the lingering presence of the divine. unfortunately, the world begins soon to "close upon the growing boy," until the glowing light dies away and becomes part of everything else. in essence, this seems a tribute to Plato's republic, where plato suggests that mankind is imprisoned within a cave, watching his existence as shadows upon a wall reflecting imperfect imitations of the true "world." if he is able to free himself and leave the cave, man will discover a bright world of clear color and form outside the cave. similarly, wordsworth suggests that mankind has come from the "divine" light of some other world. as he grows, spending more time in his "cave," and slowly accepting the shadows as the "shades of (a) prison house," the brilliant light of the outside world grows dimmer.
another passage i greatly enjoyed was the 7th stanza. here wordsworth outlines the journey from childhood to maturity. he seems to conclude that the majority of man's life is "imitation," and that humans simply move from role to role," filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'." because man is trapped in this world of illusion, he must "fit his tongue to dialogues of business, love or strife..." thus wordsworth laments the human condition, suggesting the very nature of identity is false. like before, this passage seems a refitting of Shakespeare's lament in his play "as you like it":

"All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts..."

Rhyming in Wordsworth's "Ode"

So I went through the poem and marked all of the rhymes, and I cannot tell if I was surprised or not that they didn't match. A poem of that length, well, the author would be hard pressed to make every rhyme scheme identical. But in some of the stanzas, the rhyme scheme just disappeared entirely. Granted, rhymes sound slightly different to everyone, but I think I got most of this right.

Take for instance, the third section. The rhyme scheme goes something like this:

A/ B/ B/ C/ C/ A/ D/ E/ E/ D/ F/ G/ G/ F/ F/ H/ H!

I note in each stanza whether every word has a match. Indeed, in some of the stanzas, the rhyme occurs three times, not just two. With the 'matching' rhyme scheme, there is almost more of a flow. All while trying to avoid the sing-songy voice that slips in while reading a poem, it does help the flow to the listener, I find.

So then moving along to the tenth section.

A/ B/ B/ A/ C/ C/ C/ D/ D/ E/ E/ F/ F/ G/ H/ I/ J/ K/ L.

In the beginning there is a relatively steady rhythm going on, but then when you get to the last six lines nothing fits and it draws attention those parts; as all disruption does in any aspect of life. Those lines are:

"In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring*
Out of human suffering;*
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind."

I starred the two lines I had trouble rhyming. When you read it aloud, it does rhyme, but there needs to be a certain stress on the 'ing' of 'suffering'. So even if it is a rhyme, these last six lines are still a bit of an anomaly. Indeed, (as Steph mentioned in her post) this is the point where the child has reached a point of maturity, unable to return to the days of wondering at nature.

Also, an interesting note on the last section. Each word has a matching rhyme, except for the eleventh line, where the line ends with 'mortality'. Interesting that that particular word should stand alone, considering this poem concerns one of the most immutable facts of life: age and eventually, death.

Ode

I really enjoyed this poem.  I know I say that a lot, but along with the imagery and beautiful wording, Wordsworth did something really neat with the length of his stanzas.  I may be making this up, but it would be really cool if this were indeed true.  As you read the poem, the child starts off young and the stanza's start off short.  As the poem continues, the child gets older, six years, to being a teenager when he is  "Nor man nor boy," to manhood and "philosophical thought."  As the child grows, so do the stanzas.  They start off short when the child is young and grow in length.  I have no idea if Wordsworth intended this but its neat even if he didn't.  This way you not only get the image of growth in your head but also on the page.

Ode

This poem had allot of imagery which helps you follow the speakers train of thought. It is filled with appreciation and beauty of nature. I think the poem is about how young children see the world and nature in a different way than adults. You can see if well in the first three stanzas of the poem. As they grow up, people forget to appreciate the natural beauty in the world. Children seem to have a perspective that fills nature with glory, which reappears through out the poem. The speaker explains that there was a time when the world seemed "The glory and the freshness of a dream." But "The things which I have seen I now can see no more." The speaker still retains loves of nature as an adult, but it is not the same as it once was; "there hath passed away a glory from the earth." Then the speaker has a laps in his happiness, which is not the last, but he decides that he would be doing the world wrong to be stricken with grief on such a day. The earth is happy and this makes him happy. Children are another comforting thought to the speaker.