The literary scholar Deak Nabers notes that Whitman does not mention emancipation in the epitaph and is careful not to attribute the saving of the Union to Lincoln himself, instead saying that it was preserved "under [Lincoln's] hand". Nabers draws comparisons between the poem and Melville's poem "The House-Top" and William Wells Brown's novel Clotel. The final line of the poem inverts the standard "United States was saved" to "Was saved the Union of these States", which Vendler concludes syntactically places the Union at the climax of the poem. Vendler concludes her analysis by saying that the poem has "Roman succinctness and taciturnity" and makes "dust [...] equal in weight to the salvation of the Union".