t portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed” (Whitman 529-30). The experience of the vision of Lincoln’s face was one Whitman would never forget, “I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression” (Whitman 527). The two men regularly exchanged cordial bows. The expression on Lincoln’s face was the inspirational one that Whitman had always tried to allude to in his writings, “None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face... yet there is something else there” (Whitman 532). These close experiences with Lincoln sparked the inspiration of several of his works. The following four poems were written under the title Memories of President Lincoln: Lilacs in the Door yard Bloom'd, O Captain! My Captain!, Hush’d be the Camps Today, and This Dust Was Once the Man. They occurred first in Passage to India in 1871 and were grouped under this title in 1881. When Lilacs in the Door yard Bloom'd, is a great threnody that was composed in the weeks following Lincoln's assassination. It is a tribute to President Lincoln, written with great force and subtle feeling, and was called by Swinburne "the most sweet and sonorous nocturne ever chanted in the church of the world" (Walt Whitman 2000). O Captain! My Captain! Is a poem of praise to President Lincoln, written after his death, and is the most widely known, and least characteristic poem, that Whitman ever published. Whitman compares the death of president Abraham Lincoln to the death of the captain of a ship. He is using a ship as a metaphor for the United States and the ship's captain as a metaphor for the leader of the country. This poem reflected the way most people in the North felt when Lincoln died. Utilizing the regular structure, meter and rhyme displayed he...
