My Childhood Home I See Again Analysis

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

Lincoln-lovers and New Yorkers both – about an equal number –  who take not even so gone downwards to Madison and 36th to grab "Lincoln Speaks: Words That Transformed a Nation" will want to do so, presently, before it closes on June seventh. Tracing, from boyhood on, the evolution of Lincoln's apply of language, some fourscore manuscripts brandish how he "chose words with a lawyer'south precision and poet'south sense of rhythm." This is apt, since Lincoln was, in parts and pocket-size, both. An exceptionally rare example of his verse, in fact, is among several pieces on loan to the exhibit from the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. Indeed, along with ii other pieces from its collection, most the whole of what Lincoln wrote about loss – as a teenager, a successful lawyer, and president – is on exhibit. 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 Canton, Indiana. This letter and accompanying verse form contains so, roughly half of what the most literary of all American presidents would write on the virtually unmentioned subject field of his childhood. It is a seminal account, and in it, may be found both the cause, and effect, of his profound reticence.

Having grown up, as he writes here,  in as "unpoetical as whatever spot of the earth", he nonetheless constitute even a fleeting 1844 visit to Spencer County  "aroused feelings in me which were certainly verse." He would, then "requite all I am worth, and become in debt, to be able to write" as "superb" a poem as early 19th century Scottish poet William Knox'southward dirge-similar "Mortality." No doubt its lugubrious references to a dead mother and kid, brought to mind his own composition; and hither Lincoln, in explaining its origins, mentions the unmentionable:  those two sudden and terrible losses,  of his beloved 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 nether the following circumstances. In the fall of 1844, thinking I might aid some to bear the Land of Indiana for Mr. Clay, I went into the neighborhood in that Country in which I was raised,  where my mother and only sis were buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen years. That office of the land is, within itself, every bit unpoetical as whatsoever 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 poesy is quite another question. When I got to writing, the alter of subjects divided the thing into four little divisions or cantos, the first only of which I send you now…

Lincoln mentioned but two other times, in writing, the uncomplicated fact that his female parent had died when he was boy –  and never, simply hither, that his sis had died as well. Indirectly, in his 1862 letter to a immature adult female grieving the death of her father in battle, Fanny McCullough, he allowed how sorrow came to the young with bitterest desperation "considering it takes them unawares" adding, "I accept had experience plenty to know what I say." Hither, however, are Lincoln's nigh revealing words on the devastating losses of his boyhood – and the source, most likely, of  his lifelong melancholia…

My childhood home I run across once again,
And sadden with the view;
And nonetheless, as memory crowds my brain,
At that place's pleasure in it also.
O Memory! thou midway world
'Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise…

… And so retentivity will hallow all
Nosotros've known, only know no more than.

Near twenty years have passed away
Since here I bid farewell…

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

The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, equally time has sped!
Immature childhood grown, strong manhood gray,
And 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 footstep the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I'm living in the tombs.

Lincoln'due south sense that he lived in the tombs of his youth, did not go unnoticed. From his earliest days to the final haunted photo, he was seen as veritably dripping misery every bit he walked. "No chemical element of Mr. Lincoln's character," a colleague declared, "was and so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy."  Why that was so, this letter and verse form propose, was his life in Indiana, "where things rust-covered and loved ones lost."

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

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

Five Shapell Manuscript Foundation original Lincoln autographs – including "My Childhood Home I Run into Again"; his December 23, 1862 alphabetic character to Fanny McCullough; and a rare circa 1824-1826 notebook folio, on which he copied some 5 lines of Isaac Watt'due south 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 Urban center, and may exist viewed there until June seven, 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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