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….
-- Walt Whitman (1865)
How to measure, to embrace, to understand the greatness in a man once he is gone is a challenge that confronts us in every age. In 1865, American poet Walt Whitman had been deeply moved by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on 15 April - just as the Northern victory in the American Civil War had been assured. Whitman had spent the war years as a nurse, coping with the near-Sisyphean task of aiding the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers who had streamed into the ad hoc hospitals using Washington DC’s government buildings.
In the first moments of mourning after Lincoln’s sudden death, Whitman had written of his heart-breaking loss in the poem, “O Captain, My Captain”. Then, weeks later, he wrote a more contemplative work, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
