While
this blog was observing Passover and
the Blood Moon yesterday, I had to
let the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death slide by. The horror
of the Civil War was grinding to a
halt. There was euphoria in the North, despair among the defeated Rebels.
The assassination of the victorious President
came as a thunderclap and evoked in the Union an unprecedented outpouring of grief and anguish.
Just
the stuff of poetry. Reams of the stuff
were produced. Elegies crowded the pages of newspapers,
illustrated weeklies, and high flown
literary journals alike. Walt
Whitman, of course, wrote the best remembered—three of them in fact
including O, Captain! My Captain!—the recitation piece for generation of
school children—and the evocative When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.
Fascination
with Lincoln did not fade. In fact over
time he would become ever more iconic.
And he continued to inspire poets into the 20th Century—including memorable
poems by Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsey.
In
1901 Edwin Markham, who some will
recognize as the author of the epigamic four line poem Outwitted from which this
blog draws it title, released his second volume of verse, Lincoln and Other Poems. It was a follow up to Man with the Hoe and Other Poems,
the collection that vaulted the bearded former California school teacher and superintendent to sudden fame in late
middle age. In it was Lincoln, the Man of the People later
lauded by critic Henry Van Dyke of Princeton as “the greatest poem ever
written on the immortal martyr, and the greatest that ever will be written.”
Although
very different in style from his own work, it influenced young Sandburg, like Markham a Socialist and a Universalist, and contributed to his life-long fascination with
Lincoln and his life.
When
the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated
in 1922 Robert Todd Lincoln himself
tapped the elderly poet to read his famous poem.
And
after all these years there are far worse ways to remember the Great Emancipator.
Lincoln, Man of the People
When the Norn Mother saw the
Whirlwind Hour
Greatening and darkening as it
hurried on,
She left the Heaven of Heroes and
came down
To make a man to meet the mortal
need.
She took the tried clay of the
common road—
Clay warm yet with the genial heat
of Earth,
Dashed through it all a strain of
prophecy;
Tempered the heap with thrill of
human tears;
Then mixed a laughter with the
serious stuff.
Into the shape she breathed a flame
to light
That tender, tragic, ever-changing
face.
Here was a man to hold against the
world,
A man to match the mountains and the
sea.
The color of the ground was in him,
the red earth;
The smack and tang of elemental
things;
The rectitude and patience of the
cliff;
The good-will of the rain that loves
all leaves;
The friendly welcome of the wayside
well;
The courage of the bird that dares
the sea;
The gladness of the wind that shakes
the corn;
The pity of the snow that hides all
scars;
The secrecy of streams that make
their way
Beneath the mountain to the rifted
rock;
The tolerance and equity of light
That gives as freely to the
shrinking flower
As to the great oak flaring to the
wind—
To the grave’s low hill as to the
Matterhorn
That shoulders out the sky. Sprung
from the West,
He drank the valorous youth of a new
world.
The strength of virgin forests
braced his mind,
The hush of spacious prairies
stilled his soul.
His words were oaks in acorns; and
his thoughts
Were roots that firmly gripped the
granite truth.
Up from log cabin to the Capitol,
One fire was on his spirit, one
resolve—
To send the keen ax to the root of
wrong,
Clearing a free way for the feet of
God,
The eyes of conscience testing every
stroke,
To make his deed the measure of a man.
He built the rail-pile as he built
the State,
Pouring his splendid strength
through every blow:
The grip that swung the ax in
Illinois
Was on the pen that set a people
free.
So came the Captain with the mighty
heart;
And when the judgment thunders split
the house,
Wrenching the rafters from their
ancient rest,
He held the ridgepole up, and spiked
again
The rafters of the
Home. He held his place—
Held the long purpose like a growing
tree—
Held on through blame and faltered
not at praise.
And when he fell in whirlwind, he
went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with
boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon
the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against
the sky.
—Edwin Markham
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