Abraham Lincoln Poem My House I See Again

Abraham Lincoln past Nicholas Shepherd, 1846. Library of Congress.

Lincoln-lovers and New Yorkers both – almost an equal number –  who have not yet gone down to Madison and 36th to catch "Lincoln Speaks: Words That Transformed a Nation" volition want to do so, soon, earlier it closes on June 7th. Tracing, from boyhood on, the development of Lincoln's use of language, some 80 manuscripts display how he "chose words with a lawyer'south precision and poet's sense of rhythm." This is apt, since Lincoln was, in parts and small-scale, both. An exceptionally rare example of his poetry, in fact, is among several pieces on loan to the exhibit from the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. Indeed, along with two other pieces from its collection, almost the whole of what Lincoln wrote about loss – as a teenager, a successful lawyer, and president – is on showroom. The most revelatory of these, and the longest, is the 1846 poem featured here…

Whether Lincoln, during the class of his lifetime, wrote millions of words, or merely hundreds of thousands, one stark fact emerges: less than a thousand of them had to do with the quarter of his life he spent growing up in Spencer County, Indiana. This letter and accompanying poem contains so, roughly half of what the most literary of all American presidents would write on the virtually unmentioned subject of his babyhood. It is a seminal account, and in it, may be found both the cause, and result, of his profound reticence.

Having grown up, as he writes here,  in every bit "unpoetical equally whatsoever spot of the world", he even so found fifty-fifty a fleeting 1844 visit to Spencer Canton  "aroused feelings in me which were certainly verse." He would, then "give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write" as "superb" a poem equally early 19th century Scottish poet William Knox's dirge-similar "Mortality." No doubt its lugubrious references to a dead mother and child, brought to mind his own limerick; and here Lincoln, in explaining its origins, mentions the unmentionable:  those 2 sudden and terrible losses,  of his dear mother when he was nine,  and of his sister a  decade later.

The piece of poetry of my own which I alluded to, I was led to write under the following circumstances. In the autumn 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 female parent and just sister were cached, 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 world; merely still, seeing information technology and its objects and inhabitants angry feelings in me which were certainly poetry; though whether my expression of those feelings is poesy is quite some other question. When I got to writing, the change of subjects divided the thing into four little divisions or cantos, the get-go simply of which I send you now…

Lincoln mentioned but two other times, in writing, the unproblematic fact that his mother had died when he was boy –  and never, but here, that his sis had died as well. Indirectly, in his 1862 letter of the alphabet to a immature woman grieving the death of her father in battle, Fanny McCullough, he allowed how sorrow came to the immature with bitterest agony "considering information technology takes them unawares" adding, "I have had experience enough to know what I say." Here, even so, are Lincoln's nearly revealing words on the devastating losses of his boyhood – and the source, most likely, of  his lifelong melancholia…

My childhood dwelling I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There'south pleasure in it too.
O Retentiveness! thou midway world
'Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rising…

… And then memory will hallow all
We've known, only know no more.

Nigh twenty years take passed away
Since hither I bid good day…

… Where many were, but few remain
Of old familiar things;
But seeing them, to mind again
The lost and absent-minded brings.

The friends I left that parting solar day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, stiff manhood grey,
And one-half of all are dead.

I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And stride the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I'm living in the tombs.

Lincoln's sense that he lived in the tombs of his youth, did not get unnoticed. From his primeval days to the last haunted photograph, he was seen as veritably dripping misery as he walked. "No element of Mr. Lincoln'south character," a colleague declared, "was and so marked, obvious and ingrained equally his mysterious and profound melancholy."  Why that was then, this letter of the alphabet and verse form advise, was his life in Indiana, "where things decayed and loved ones lost."

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 1809-1865. The 16th President of the United States.

Autograph Alphabetic character Signed ("A. Lincoln"), incorporating the Autograph Manuscript of his poem offset "My childhood domicile I see again",  4 pages, quarto, Tremont, Illinois,  April 16, 1846. To Andrew Johnston.

Five Shapell Manuscript Foundation original Lincoln autographs – including "My Childhood Home I See Again"; his December 23, 1862 letter to Fanny McCullough; and a rare circa 1824-1826 notebook folio, on which he copied some five lines of Isaac Watt's hymn "Time, what an empty vapor 'tis!" – are currently on display at the Morgan Library's "Lincoln Speaks: Words That Transformed a Nation" exhibition in New York City, and may be viewed there until June 7, 2015.

Manuscripts Related To This Article

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Source: http://www.shapell.org/historical-perspectives/between-the-lines/abraham-lincoln-autobiographical-letter-poem-childhood-home-see/

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