On this day (penultimate April) in history, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train arrived in Cleveland OH, following his assassination on 4/14/1865. As described by Tim Evanson on FB today:
The coffins of President Abraham Lincoln and his son Willie [who had died in the White House, of typhoid fever, on 2/20/1862] were under military guard at all times aboard the funeral train. The train consisted of nine cars. The second-to-last car was “United States”, the hearse car containing the bodies of father and son.
The city’s church bells tolled mourning as the funeral train arrived at the Union Depot on the lake shore at 6:50 AM. The locomotive L. Case was detached, and the locomotive Dispatch then pulled the train along the tracks west of Spring Street (now W. 10th) to the Euclid St. Station (near the intersection of Old River Rd. and Canal).
When the Dispatch reached the station at 7:20 AM, there was a 36-gun salute. An embalmer removed the lid of the coffin to make sure the president’s body was presentable to the public. Pallbearers lifted the coffin onto a hearse, and the procession left the station at 7:30 AM.
The march funeral procession went up Superior, and reached Public Square at 9:15 AM. A pavilion had been erected there to protect the catafalque. A large cross of verbena, roses, geraniums, fuchsia was placed at the foot of the coffin.
More than 40,000 people stood in line to file past the remains. The crowd was utterly silent, although some weeping could be heard. A light rain came down all day, but no one left the line.
The casket was closed at 10 PM, and a funeral procession returned the casket to the train station.
At midnight, the funeral train pulled out and left for Columbus.
Walt Whitman wrote two of his most remarkable poems following Lincoln’s death: “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d” (from the summer of 1865, during the period of national mourning Tim Evanson reported on above); and “O Captain! My Captain!” (an elegy — well, a keening outpouring of grief — from November 1865).
Now, brief samples from these two passionate overflowing works.
From “When lilacs last…”.
1
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.… 6
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces, …
From “O Captain!…”. Against his unraveling in grief, Whitman wrote this brief poem in metered, rhyming verse. The very beginning, the very end:
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 …… Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Whitman’s style and language. But it’s the Whitman of “When lilacs last…”, rolling in great waves of free verse, that stunned and transformed American literature. From the Poetry Foundation site, “Walt Whitman 101: Celebrating everybody’s radical poet” by Benjamin Voigt on 6/30/15:
Whitman abandoned traditional poetic style and elevated language. He pioneered a unique type of free verse that combined spontaneous, prosaic rhythms with incantatory repetition that he found in the Old Testament
This is the Whitman I reveled in as a teenager: the passion of “When lilacs last…”, then the great waves of plain speech, and (in the Calamus poems) the spark of erotic bonds between men.
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