When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd Whitman's encounter with the lilacs in bloom in his mother's yard caused the flowers to become "viscerally bound to the memory of Lincoln's death". According to Gregory Eiselein: In the weeks before Lincoln's assassination, Whitman observed the planet Venus shining brightly in the evening sky. He later wrote of the observation, "Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here. The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity,
Deferent and epicycle prograde motion. Near opposition, the planet would appear to reverse and move through the night sky faster than the stars for a time in retrograde motion before reversing again and resuming prograde. Epicyclic theory, in part, sought to explain this behavior. The inferior planets were always observed to be near the Sun, appearing only shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset. Their apparent retrograde motion occurs during the transition between evening star into morning star, as they pass between the Earth and the Sun. When ancient astronomers viewed the sky, they saw the Sun, Moon, and stars moving overhead in