The speaker in Walt Whitman’s “Warble for Lilac-time” observes the scenery of a spring day, and is sure to notice the beauty of it. The scents of newly bloomed lilacs, the sky, the birds and their wings. Almost all of the imagery in this poem is focused on nature’s beauty. Unlike much of Whitman’s poetry, this poem positions the speaker as a very passive observer of nature rather than a prophetic voice in humanity. In observing nature, the speaker comes to accept the inevitable forces of life and that death is a natural part of life, just as all t
he patterns of nature continue through time without need for interference or reminder. As a contrast to the light and easy feel of the first portion of the first long stanza, the speaker becomes momentarily detached from his surroundings and questions what it would be like to be a bird, to escape, to sail like a ship among other imaginations.
Much of the diction used in this poem is simple, everyday language with a few exceptions of the use of “thou,” which occurs only while the speaker goes into a thought process of becoming a bird or sailing away like a ship. In reading the poem aloud, one may notice that many of these words, when placed next to each other, could be said to be tongue twisters. They are rather complex phrases. This causes the poem to have a very interesting sound; similar to the sounds of sitting in the wilderness and the many different calls and noises occurring one after another. For example, Whitman writes, “The maple woods, the crisp February days, and the sugar-making; / The robin, where he hops, bright-eyed, brown-breasted,” (lines 12-13).
There is hardly any punctuation in the form of sentences closed with a period, but Whitman does frequently use exclamation points in the section of prophetic tone.
The pacing of the poem remains relatively casual until the shift towards the end of the first stanza when Whitman uses exclamation points and heiffans to break down into an existential questioning. I think that this portion of the poem is very explicative of the poem’s overall meaning. It finds itself in the middle of a poem interested in the beauty and effortlessness of nature’s life cycles and patterns of seasons. In the midst of a very calm and meditative state, the speaker is shaken by internal wondering of “what ifs,” where he exclaims phrases such as, “O for another world! O if one could but fly like a bird! O to escape- to sail forth, as in a ship!”(lines 21-22). These lines represent the human inability to understand life and the natural force fueling it, as they are nestled between two stanzas that show the speaker accepting life and death as a part of a bigger cycle.
An emphasis on nature’s life cycles is also present in the structure of the poem and its imagery. The opening lines of the poem describes a spring day, “Souvenirs of earliest summer—birds’ eggs, and the first berries”(line 4), which soon turns to winter, “The maple woods, the crisp February days” and it ultimately ends on another spring scene, “The melted snow of March—the willow sending forth its yellow-green sprouts” (line16). The difference between the first long stanza and the last, shorter one is that the speaker seems to have come to a certain conclusion about his part in the larger schemes of life. This conclusion is that his physical body and where he comes from and what he looks like is “to serve in songs,” (line 32).
All in all, “Warble for Lilac-time,” may seem like prose depicting simply the beauty of nature’s creation but, with an investigative eye, readers may find this poem to be another existential exploration of the world from Whitman’s speaker. Sure, Whitman fills most of these lines with images of robins, melting snow, new sprouts and other various scenes from nature, but there is a bigger picture to be seen when he chooses to zoom out of that perfect little bubble of lilac-time. The speaker, in the closing lines of the poem, recognizes himself as a piece of life’s bigger puzzle of moving parts. More personally, however, the speaker seems to come to accept death as a part of this larger puzzle of life.
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