The coffin is seen passing, the great cloud darkening the land, the cities draped in black, the sea of faces silent and solemn, and the mournful voices of dirges strongly rising. Joining, the poet chants an elegy for the "sane and sacred death". He looks up and sees the western fallen star. "O the black murk that hides the star!" he thus laments. When he looks around, he spots the lilac bush blossoming in the dooryard and feels its physical appeal strongly. Then he becomes conscious of a shy and hidden thrush warbling forth "Death's outlet song of life". The lilac bush, with its rich colors and scent, represents physical life, while the hermit thrush bodies forth spiritual life. And the poet finds himself attracted to both. It is apparent that he has got to progress from the one to the other, namely, to reconcile a love of life, to quote James Miller, with a love of death, death as representing rebirth onto spiritual life. Thus gradually we see the poet recovering from his deep grief over mortality and becoming aware of the spiritual existence of Lincoln and his immortality. The song of the bird, which he is beginning to appreciate, induces him "a mystical state" from which come mystical visions: "To the tally of my soul,/ Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird/ While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,/As to long panoramas of visions." In this way, "Lilac and star and bird twined with the ehant of my soul". Reading the poem we perceive the stages through which the mind of the poet goes through. The poetic process is highly symbolic: the star is associated with the thought of death, the lilac with a token of life for the dead, and the bird with insight and knowledge of death not as the end but as the beginning of new life. .
Death is a permanent theme in literature, especially for poems. Elegiac feeling in American literature does not, in fact, characteristically take for its occasion the death of an individual.