Lincoln's Poetry

Margaret Mary Moran
Brookwood Junior High School, Glenwood

The poem Mortality was Abraham Lincoln's favorite poem. He often recited it to himself when no one was listening. He copied it in his letters to his friends commenting to them that, "I would give all I am worth and go in debt, to be able to write like that." Like anyone else who has a cherished poem, Lincoln had two favorite stanzas:

"Yea! hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,
Are mingled together in sunshine and rain;
And the smile and the tear and the song and the dirge
Still follow each other, like surge upon surge.
Tis the wink of an eye, Tis the draught of a breath,
From the blossom of health; to the paleness of death,
From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud—
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

Lincoln had been interested in poetry all of his life. The oldest collected poems by Abraham Lincoln were written when he was between fifteen and seventeen years old. Most of them seemed to be childish and crudely written. Two of the poems that classify as childhood doggerel are:

Abraham Lincoln
his hand and pen
he will be good but
god knows When

The second bit of youthful doggerel is as follows:

Abraham Lincoln is my nam[e]
And with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote in both hast[e] and speed
and left it here for fools to read

Lincoln also wrote about things that meant a lot to him. One of these things was his longing to see his old home in Indiana again. Lincoln wrote in a letter to Andrew Jackson in February 1846:

The piece of poetry of my own which I alluded to, I was led to write under the following circumstances. In the fall of 1844, thinking I might aid some to carry the State of Indiana for Mr. Clay, I went into the neighborhood in that State in which I was raised, where my mother and only sister were buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen years. That part of the country is, within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth; but still, seeing it and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry; though whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question. When I got to writing, the change of subjects divided the thing into four little divisions or cantos, the first only of which I send you now and may send the others hereafter.

The canto Lincoln sent Jackson was from his poem My Childhood-Home I See Again:

My childhood-home I see again,
  And gladden with the view;
And still as mem'ries crowd my brain,
  There's sadness in it too.
O memory! thou mid-way world
  Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed, an loved ones lost
  In dreamy shadows rise ....
I range the fields with pensive tread,
  And pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companions of the dead)
  I'm living in the tombs.

In some books such as The Best Loved Poems of the American People, The Family Book of Best Loved Poems, and The World's Best Loved Poems, My Childhood-Home I See Again is listed under the name of Memory.

Lincoln continued to send poetry to Jackson as he had promised. The canto of a poem that he sent Jackson was called The Maniac, which was about a person that Lincoln knew. The subject was Matthew Gentry who was only three years older than Lincoln and had gone to school with Lincoln when they were younger. Gentry went violently mad when he was nineteen but soon became passively insane. Lincoln saw him when he visited his old home in 1844. Gentry was in a horrible condition, and the sight of him affected Lincoln so greatly that Lincoln wrote a poem about him. In the first stanza, Lincoln referred to Gentry as someone of whom you should be very afraid. Later in the poem it seemed that Lincoln was mourning over the loss of the man's sanity as if he were mad. By the end of the poem Lincoln wrote that it is not fair that many sane people have died while Gentry is still living without his mind. Lincoln's second letter to Jackson, containing The Maniac, ended with this statement: "If I should ever send another [poem], the subject will be a 'Bear Hunt'." A year after Lincoln wrote his first letter, he wrote his third letter with a canto from the poem The Bear Hunt.

My Childhood-Home I See Again, The Maniac, and The Bear Hunt were not Lincoln's only poems. Lincoln also wrote America's Task, The Bulwark of Liberty, The Faith of Abraham Lincoln, I Am Not Bound To Win, and Let Us Have Faith That Right Has Might. At least one critic also considers the Gettysburg Address to be poetry because of its beautiful language and rhythmical style.

While Lincoln's poetry is perhaps not great it is noteworthy. Certainly Lincoln was a diversely talented man.—[From Paul M. Angle, The Collected Poetry of Abraham Lincoln; Dale Carnegie, Lincoln the Unknown: Thomas Curtis Clark and Robert Earle Clark, Poems for the Great Days; Hazel Felleman, The Best Loved Poems of the American People; Donald T. Kauftman, The Treasury of Religious Verse; Victoria Kline, Last Lines; Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia; Stephen B. Gates, With Malice Toward None; Robert L. Polley, ed., Lincoln.]

38	ILLINOIS HISTORY / FEBRUARY 1995