George Crumb’s song cycle Apparition, finished in 1979, sets selected texts from Walt Whitman’s elegy to Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” This paper seeks to identify the specific musical factors in Apparition that can evoke a series of reactions in an emotive listener that mirror the emotional process of grieving as described by psychology literature. The paper begins with a brief description of modern theories of the grieving process, followed by a short discussion of non-musical factors that may influence a listener’s emotional reaction to the work. The third section presents interpretations of the song cycle in reference to the emotions experienced during the three phases of grief model. Both empirical evidence and motivic development will be considered. The final section outlines how performers can incorporate the analysis above into a performance of the song cycle.