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Lincoln Poems 2007
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Lincoln Poems - web page 3
By Dan Guillory
Cutting and Pasting
As he did in his political maneuvering, Lincoln was careful and exacting in his writing, taking his time and putting the manuscript through several drafts and revisions. Lincoln also carried notes and ideas, which he called “Randoms,” on little slips of paper. He typically inserted these jottings into the lining of his stovepipe hat, a kind of portable desk. During the Washington years, he also stuffed his real desk with countless pieces of paper, including unsent letters. According to Douglas Wilson, author of Lincoln’s Sword, the President liked to make a preliminary printed copy of a formal address. Then he subsequently scissored the printed speech into blocks of text, between which he inserted his handwritten notes, then pasted the whole sequence onto large sheets of “foolscap” paper. In effect, he “deconstructed” his own text as a way of improving it. Lincoln would probably have been quite handy and comfortable with a modern-day word processor—he certainly understood the logic of revision. Lincoln’s “First Inaugural,” went through this complex process, with additional commentary from Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, who formulated the phrase “better angels of the nation,” famously revised by Lincoln into “better angels of our nature.” Lincoln also repeatedly ran afoul of Mr. John D. Defrees, a former newspaper editor who served as Superintendent of Public Printing, the man responsible for printing the final version of the document. Defrees complained that Lincoln’s “use of commas was excessive.” Lincoln delivered his great speech on March 4, 1861.
The speech is always a work in progress.
Only the dead receive a tombstone text,
Words chiseled into marble. For the living
Write their random notes, tucking them
Into waistcoat pockets, or the lining of a hat,
Even while walking down the avenue.
The hat is metaphor for the mind, comma,
Damn Defrees for tinkering with my text!
Or Seward who is wise but not wise enough
To sense that speech is metaphor for life,
And words arrive as whisperings
From the better angels of our nature.
Wintering
Mid-nineteenth-century climate was, on the whole, abnormally cold. Even though reliable meteorological statistics do not appear until the 1870’s, there is ample anecdotal evidence for the severe winters that appeared in the decades before the Civil War. In Illinois, the winter of 1830-1831 was especially bitter, and it was the first winter experienced by the extended Lincoln family in Illinois. Carl Sandburg has written lyrically about this memorable season in his biography of Lincoln. Old Bob was one of Lincoln’s favorite horses. His real name was Robin, and he sported a reddish-brown coat.
Each day the prairie eats more of the sun,
Swallows brightness, buries luminosity
Under the Loam, under darkening seams
Of coal and small crenellated outcroppings.
This is the slow digestion of Life.
Whatever moves, lives, or lightens
The load goes down like that sycamore
Crusted with ice, roaring and cracking
Under its own improbable weight.
Old Bob knows this wisdom, his fine
Ears brushed by falling snow, silver
Hooves marching through the moonlight.
Readings
As an autodidact, Lincoln read voraciously even in his early years in Spencer County, Indiana where books were hard to come by. He continued his self-education in New Salem, and later in Springfield, especially after making Billy Herndon his law partner. Herndon regularly brought books to their office for Lincoln to peruse. Lincoln’s reading list included the Bible, the poetry of Robert Burns, Shakespeare (especially Richard III, Macbeth, and Hamlet), and Blackstone’s Commentaries on English Law. He also studied Bingham’s Columbian Orator (1816), Kirkham’s Grammar (1818), and the enlightenment philosophy of Volney’s Ruins (1828). In later life, Lincoln studied Euclid rigorously to compensate for his lack of formal education. Lincoln had strong streaks of narcissism and solipsism in his make-up, so he found deep, meditative readings practically irresistible.
At first, I read books—
Shakespeare, Volney, Burns
And Blackstone, the columns
Of text planted like Illinois corn.
But the Prairie was my true Grammarian,
The small, bright Orations of springtime,
The unforgiving syntax of Winter, each flake
A cognate of its fellows.
It is a Library, all this turning
Of leaves, growing older day
By day, reading the Lexicons
As if to find that ineffable Word.
Milking, 1854
Garry Wills, Ronald White, Daniel Epstein, and Douglas Wilson have all written excellent analyses of Lincoln’s style of writing and thinking. Essentially, Lincoln’s mind worked somewhat like a computer with its binary “on-off” logic. He tended to see things as paired opposites, and he naturally favored the rhetorical device of antithesis. In his famous “House Divided” speech of 1858, he remarked, in typical fashion, that the “government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” The italics are Lincoln’s—he often italicized key words, especially when he wanted to emphasize a contrast. In 1854, Lincoln’s perennial opponent, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, engineered the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act, which allowed for “popular sovereignty” in those vast territories, thus allowing slavery to be introduced in formerly free territory. Lincoln was outraged, and he promptly awoke from his political slumber, becoming one of the most vocal opponents of the bill. The Kansas Nebraska Act became Lincoln’s entrée to the national political scene. In the 1840’s and 1850’s, many Springfield residents still had barns and enough land to maintain a milking cow, as the Lincolns did at their home on the corner of Eighth and Jackson.
In the Springfield morning, smoked with hickory and ash,
I sit on the stool, milking an old dun cow, enjoying
The tinny sound of milk under pressure, as it pings
And drills into my deep wooden bucket.
The udder grows alternately hard, then soft
As I squeeze and finesse, thinking Kansas
Nebraska, North South, Free and Slave.
It must all become one thing—or another.
The teat goes dry in my hand, the bag emptied
At last, warm milk brimming in the bucket,
A dog barking in the distance,
As now the day begins.
City Point, 1865
City Point, Virginia was a boat-landing on the James River, south of Richmond and Petersburg. City Point served as the command center and headquarters for General Ulysses S. Grant. Very much a “hands on” Commander in Chief, Lincoln visited Grant at City Point, sailing down the Potomac River, and back up the peninsula on the James. In the early spring of 1865, shortly before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, Lincoln visited Grant for the last time, accompanied by Mary and Tad. Lincoln reviewed the troops, visited their encampments, and discussed strategy with Grant. Mary created an unpleasant scene, retreated to her quarters, and pouted. The Union troops cheered Lincoln enthusiastically. These soldiers had cast their absentee ballots in the presidential campaign of 1864, a bloc of votes that helped put Lincoln over the top. “Lorena” was a popular ballad of the day, sung by both Union and Confederate soldiers.
The little white tents spread their wings like moths,
As the gray-blue evening thickens with soldiers
And the sweet smoke of uncountable campfires.
The Old James River tumbles along, smelling
Of turtles and fish, oblivious to the War.
So Victory is a pleasant little boat-ride
Down the peninsula, a lonely trooper singing
“Lorena,” and a grossly fat Moon
Falling asleep on the River.
Mud Hole
In Life in Prairie Land (1846), a vivid and telling memoir of life on the Illinois frontier in the 1830’s, Eliza Farnham describes how elegantly dressed ladies from the East met the ghastly reality of springtime in Illinois when their wagons and carriages capsized or sank in the numerous “slews” and mud holes engulfing the primitive roads and trails. Nearly a century would pass before paved roads became common in the farm country that Lincoln knew and loved. The most popular song writer of the day, Stephen Foster, described a similar problem in his famous tune, “Camptown Races” (1850):
The long-tailed filly and the big black hoss,
They plowed up the track and they both run across.
The black hoss stickin’ in a big mud hole—
They can’t touch bottom with a ten-foot pole!
In the antebellum period, ladies’ undergarments were designed with slits in the bottom to facilitate their use of outhouses and chamber pots. The women were already seriously encumbered by whalebone corsets, crinolines, and petticoats. Lincoln traveled the old road from New Salem to Springfield many times before settling in Springfield on April 15, 1837.
The roads in Spring Time, like inadequate
Arguments, lead to draws, slews,
And bottomless holes. Those sweet ladies
In the overturned buggy, their legs
Flaccid and fish-belly white, open
Their slitted drawers to the sky.
I am on my way to Springfield,
Taking all this as a sign—the Art
Of Politics is apprehending the unmentionable
And pretending that it never happened.
Bullet in My Brain, April 14, 1865
“Goober Peas” or soft-boiled peanuts were the rations of last resort for the Georgia militiamen during the Civil War. Their song “Goober Peas” became popular on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, and it was still performed as part of the military repertoire well into the twentieth century:
Peas, peas, peas, peas,
Eating Goober peas.
Goodness, how delicious,
Eating goober peas!
The bullet from assassin John Wilkes Booth lodged in Lincoln’s brain on the evening of April 14, 1865 in Ford’s Theater in Washington. Lincoln died the next morning in the William Petersen House across the street. His body was then brought to the White House where surgeons sawed open his skull and removed the tiny but deadly projectile. It is now believed that Lincoln might have survived that trauma if modern medicine had been available—he may even have recovered and led a relatively normal life. Apparently, the speech center of the brain was not affected. The brain was little understood in Lincoln’s day, except for the pseudoscience of Phrenology.
Smaller than a Goober Pea, the leaden
Vessel lies foundering in the Bay of Memory,
Beyond the gravelly shoals of Speech
And the untamed currents of Hysteria.
Identity becomes amorphous, a flattened
Ball of lead spiraling downward,
Downward, until there is no more
Of More—and even History dies.
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