“Lincolniana”

Scott Borchert

(This essay first appeared in Southwest Review, Volume 100, Number 1, Winter 2015, and is reproduced here by permission of the editors.)

February the twelfth, at noon. It was ten below freezing in Jersey City, the kind of cold that keeps people indoors. And yet I found myself out-of-doors that day, in a park, amid heaps of frozen snow, surrounded by strangers. We were singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—well, I was mouthing the words while the others mostly belted it out. It was my birthday (and also, improbably, my mother’s birthday), but none of these people knew it. We were there to celebrate someone else: Abraham Lincoln, who had just turned two hundred and five.

There weren’t many of us at the ceremony in Lincoln Park—no more than thirty—and those who showed up effectively constituted the Jersey City Abraham Lincoln Association. The JCALA meets every February twelfth, and has done so since 1867, making it the oldest such organization in the country; its presence in Jersey City predates electric light, automobiles, and widespread indoor plumbing. Anyone who shows up at the ceremony is considered a member. I was there reporting for a news story that, in the end, never appeared. Really, I was there out of curiosity, the same nebulous fascination I’ve had with Lincoln since I was old enough to understand that we shared a birthday, and to feel like I ought to find that somehow significant.

The day was all sunlight and high winds, clear as only a winter day can be. We had gathered at the park’s entrance near a bronze statue that sat atop a stone pedestal. Lincoln the Mystic. In this depiction by James Earle Fraser, Lincoln is seated, head bowed and hands clasped between his knees, looking a little forlorn (a modest counterpoint to that dreary Zeus hulking and absurd in his temple two hundred miles to the south). The ceremony proceeded rapidly, one step ahead of hypothermia. A color guard, pledge of allegiance, benediction, short remarks, some songs, all leading up to the main event: a wreath laying. I watched a young guy in a hoodie scale the monument’s pedestal and fasten a small wreath to Lincoln’s stomach. It was red, white, and blue. We applauded.

No one recited any poetry, which seemed to me an odd omission. The closest thing was Lincoln’s letter to Lydia Bixby, a widow whose five sons were all believed killed fighting for the Union. A man who looked old enough to be a surviving Bixby boy recited the four sentences from memory. (Someone told me later that this man, a retired doctor, knew all of Lincoln’s major writings by heart.) The perfect rhythm of the letter, the spare elegance of the prose—this seemed a better monument to Lincoln than the bronze one before us, or even the ceremony itself. I looked at the statue anyway, whose living referent had long since gone to dust. That weird statue of Lincoln the humble, the meditative, the doomed. What were we doing there, freezing our asses off?

A Lincoln ceremony without a poem—perhaps there was a clue in that unfortunate absence. Lincoln is surely the most written-about American president, and some of that writing is poetry, and some of it is quite good. There are plenty of poems to choose from, if the JCALA had wanted to choose. But who am I kidding? If there had been a poem (and if it wasn’t by Carl Sandburg), it would be something by Whitman.

Walt Whitman is the master of Lincolniana in verse. He composed multiple poems about Lincoln’s death, two of which—“O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”—are among his best-known, perhaps among the best-known by any American poet. The living Lincoln also appears scattered throughout Whitman’s prose, notably in Specimen Days & Collect, where, among other entries, the poet recalls a time when Lincoln would pass by his Washington, DC home nearly every day, and the two strangers became familiar enough to exchange cordial nods. (Although wonderfully written, especially for Whitman’s observation that no painter could hope to capture the “deep latent sadness” of Lincoln’s face, the piece carries the dubious sort of claim we hear from people who often run into an admired celebrity: “Oh yeah, Honest Abe comes into this deli all the time, I wouldn’t say we’re buddies but I give him a little nod and he definitely recognizes me.”)

So it would almost certainly be Whitman recited on that February twelfth. Maybe the two aforementioned poems, or maybe “Hush’d Be the Camps To-day,” which in four brief stanzas invokes “the heavy hearts of soldiers” in mourning for “Our dear commander’s death” and invites the speaker to “sing poet in our name / Sing of the love we bore him.” Or perhaps the single stanza of “This Dust Was Once the Man,” a solemn epitaph for the leader “under whose cautious hand . . . Was saved the Union of these States.” That poem seems especially fitting for the JCALA ceremony: it is lyrical, blandly patriotic, and, considering the temperature that day, mercifully short.

Less likely a choice would be the lonely and somewhat forgotten poem “The Martyr” by Herman Melville. But Melville is, with Whitman, the most significant poet who lived through the war and devoted much energy to capturing it in verse. He published “The Martyr” in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War in 1866, an uneven but thorough and complex document of the conflict that contains some of his best poetry. Melville hoped that Battle-Pieces would revive his career and perhaps his artistic spirit, both wounded by the critical hostility, and later apathy, directed toward Moby-Dick, Pierre, and subsequent novels. But it was not to be. The collection received few reviews (few of them good) and couldn’t reverse the downward trajectory of Melville’s career.

Today Battle-Pieces is held in higher esteem, or at least is better known, thanks in part to Robert Penn Warren, who assembled an influential collection of Melville’s poems in 1970, including selections from Battle-Pieces. In the introductory essay to that collection, he calls Whitman and Melville “the poets of the Civil War.” But he makes his preference plain: “to my mind it is clear that Whitman is the bigger poet.” (And this in a collection meant to celebrate Melville!) As for “The Martyr,” Melville’s meditation on the death of Lincoln, Warren makes no explicit judgment, but his feelings are easy to discern. He does not mention the poem in the essay or include it among the selections from Battle-Pieces. It doesn’t make the cut.

And maybe he is right. Whitman’s Lincoln poems are alive with convincing emotion, mournful without being maudlin; they were prompted by Lincoln’s death but contain the accumulated grieving of centuries, rooted in no specific place and attached to no specific corpse but somehow intrinsic to the experience of being human. Alongside these poems, “The Martyr” seems unimaginative and distant. The first stanza presents a Lincoln-as-Christ figure, a tired image even at the time and widespread in contemporary remembrances. (It’s understandable, though, that a superstitious people, confronted with the murder of a beloved leader on Good Friday, would almost instinctually reach for this image; to writers and poets of the time it must have seemed unavoidable.) The rest of the poem is both narrow and vague as it dwells on Lincoln’s death—that is, his assassination—and twice repeats the warning refrain, “Beware the People weeping / When they bare the iron hand.” Melville’s meaning is obvious but also sort of bland, and the poem does little else but inform us that Lincoln is dead and that the moment is charged with the potential for vengeance. What will come next, or even what should, isn’t clear. (Melville didn’t help the poem by appending a footnote that says, more-or-less, well we know how that turned out.)

It is not always useful, though, to set poems on the scales of quality, measure their weight, and leave it at that. Melville and Whitman approached Lincoln’s death differently and composed different kinds of poems; setting them against each other in terms of artistic value might tell us something about each poet but it tells us little about Lincoln, or about how Lincoln and his death exist in our cultural imagination. There is another way to read these poems.

Whitman’s poetry confronts Lincoln’s death, absorbs it, and processes it through toward some kind of emotional resolution. They are poems about grieving—that is, poems concerned with the subjective experience of the speaker who must acknowledge and accept the death of Lincoln. This is especially true of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”: the poem carries us from a “trinity” of stimuli that remind the speaker of Lincoln’s death (the lilac newly “bloom’d,” “the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,” and the “ever-returning spring”), to the memory of Lincoln’s funeral procession (the “coffin that slowly passes” on which the speaker leaves a “sprig of lilac”), and finally, through the remainder of the poem, toward acceptance and even celebration of death as the end of all suffering (“but praise! praise! praise! / For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death”). Lincoln’s death attains significance only as it is subsumed by the speaker’s consciousness; the beloved corpse disrupts the speaker’s emotional landscape but gradually is received and interred there, peaceably. “O Captain! My Captain!” repeats this process but in a way that is more starkly subjective: Lincoln’s death is absorbed and re-coded as an extended metaphor, a projection of the speaker’s imaginative power but one step further removed from Lincoln’s death as an objective, historical event. “My Captain” is not only a term of endearment and loyalty, but a claim on the person—“my symbol” for the actual Lincoln.

These poems are not about Lincoln per se but about what the knowledge of his death feels like for the speaker. In this sense, they are of a piece with that unwieldy mass of poems called Leaves of Grass, in which social phenomena are encountered and absorbed by a kind of inescapable hyper-consciousness. The Lincoln poems are instances of this general approach; they present the president’s death as an event that resonates within the mind of the poem’s speaker, whether it is the sharp clear tone of “This Dust Was Once the Man” or the deep and languid reverberations of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

Melville’s “The Martyr” is something else entirely. Not that the content of the poem isn’t somehow a projection of the speaker’s mind (how can a poem be otherwise?), but rather that Lincoln’s death occupies a different place in the poem and has a different thematic function. The first stanza begins with that Lincoln-Christ-figure and seems akin to Whitman’s grief poems. But the last lines of the stanza take an unsettling turn: “But they killed him in his kindness / In their madness and their blindness, / And they killed him from behind.” It’s hard to imagine Whitman writing a line that blunt, and by comparison it sounds almost irreverent. Melville does it again in the third stanza, which begins “He lieth in his blood”—a gruesome image that Whitman avoided—and then introduces a new figure, “The Avenger” (Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson), who replaces the slain president (“the Forgiver”). Following the first and third stanzas is the refrain that warns of a “People weeping” who “bare the iron hand,” and the poem ends on that ominous warning—still but hardly peaceful, and short on consolation.

This is no elegy, and the speaker is not working through a sense of grief (although the poem does spring from a deep and powerful grievance). “The Martyr” might begin like a conventional, or even clichéd, poem of mourning, but Melville subverts that convention with his blunt and unsentimental lines describing the assassination. What matters here is not so much the emotional response of the speaker but the conflict of social forces that precipitated—and was heightened by—Lincoln’s death. Think of the poem as composed of three elements. First, there is Lincoln and his death, a super-charged event that repels “the People” in their grief as it compels them toward (potential) vengeance. Second, the poem’s ubiquitous “they,” the “evil-willed” and the “parricides” who represent the actual conspirators but also the entire unreconstructed Confederacy and the most fervent enemies of the Union. Third, “the People weeping” (and “The Avenger” as their representative) whose loyalty to the first element, the slain Lincoln, and to the Union put them in irreconcilable conflict with the second element.

Here is what sets “The Martyr” apart from Whitman’s poems. The latter re-enact and aestheticize the mourning process; they revel in the lush subjectivity of the speaker. The only conflict they contain, broadly speaking, is that between life and death. Melville’s poem shifts the emphasis away from the mourning process and towards a real historical conflict that exists outside the mind of the speaker. It is a poem generated by the tension between those three elements I’ve mentioned: Lincoln’s death is placed at the nexus of conflicting socio-historical forces.

What’s more, Melville does not proceed through the three elements in a linear fashion, as the speaker would have experienced them. The structure of the poem does not simply tell us that some people killed Lincoln and now some other people are angry. Instead, it begins with Lincoln and his assassins bound together in the first stanza, and moves to the anguished masses in the second stanza, and then effectively doubles back on itself by repeating this pattern in the third and fourth stanzas. All three elements, then, are fused into a compact whole, which emphasizes how they exist in relation to each other, as seen from “above” or “outside” a simple narrative of cause-and-effect. The title of the poem reinforces this feeling of inter-connectedness: the “Martyr” of the poem is, really, the first element (Lincoln) seen through the eyes of the second element (“the People weeping”) once the third element (the assassins) got through with him. The effect of all this is that, as the poem progresses, the speaker as a subjective conscious mind seems to recede, and, in place of the speaker’s grief, we are left with a warning like something out of the Old Testament, a cold and weighty commandment: “Beware the People weeping / When they bare the iron hand.”

We’ve seen this before in Melville’s writing. Just as Whitman’s treatment of Lincoln’s death harmonizes with the intensely subjective Leaves of Grass, “The Martyr” is like an echo of that famously receding subjectivity we find in Moby-Dick. The first chapter of Melville’s great work begins fully immersed in the mind of the narrator, signaled by the opening sentence: “Call me Ishmael.” But as the pages turn, Ishmael withdraws from scenes on the Pequod’s decks and his voice is increasingly relegated to ancillary chapters on whales and whaling. Out of an ever shallower first-person narrative emerges a conflict between three elements: Ahab and the whale are two elements, of course, and the third is a force that would hold Ahab in check, comprised of the crew (most but not all of whom he eventually wins over) and various ideologies (moral, Christian, financial) that might be deployed to argue against Ahab’s (dangerous, heretical, unprofitable) course. The comparison is not perfect, to be sure—but in this sense “The Martyr” has more in common with Moby-Dick than it does with Whitman’s poems on the same subject.

The point is that when we encounter Whitman and Melville’s poems, we encounter different Lincolns. For Whitman, Lincoln is a loss that we mourn, and a poem the thing that will carry us through our mourning toward acceptance and resolution. His Lincoln poems are perhaps best understood as vastly superior examples of the myriad elegies and tributes—poems, sermons, lectures—that began when Edwin Stanton, standing over the president’s death bed, conferred Lincoln to the ages. For Melville, however, mourning Lincoln is not enough; he must be understood in context, as a powerful symbol caught up in roiling social forces, the flashpoint of a conflict whose resolution is still perhaps in question. “The Martyr” then prefigures much subsequent writing about Lincoln: a poem like Allen Ginsberg’s adaptation of Pablo Neruda’s “Let the Railsplitter Awake!” in which Lincoln appears as a one-man liberation army against oppression, or Robert Lowell’s tensely ambivalent “Abraham Lincoln,” in which the violence of the war and its aftermath is recalled in horror. Whitman achieved the very best of one approach; Melville opened up the space for another.

Which approach was better-suited for that winter day in Jersey City? Were we there in mourning, or perhaps in defense of some contested symbol? “The People weeping”—was that us? The wind sucked tears from our eyes but no one was crying. If anything, the mood was light. No one was about to throw him- or herself toward the statue, arms extended, howling for our fallen captain. It seemed as though we were there for every reason, and for no reason. (“I like Abe and George Washington,” one woman told me, gripping the air with an upturned hand, “because they had cojones!”)

In one sense, the JCALA ceremony was easy enough to comprehend: Lincoln’s place in American history, and in our cultural imagination, has remained undiminished since the night John Wilkes Booth strode into Ford’s Theatre. The particulars might change, as each succeeding generation invents new narratives and criticisms and emphases while discarding some of the old ones, but Lincoln always draws a crowd, or at least demands attention. After the ceremony I wrote to the historian Eric Foner to ask why this is so. Foner has spent decades studying the tangle of lives and ideas and events that flowed into and out of the Civil War and Reconstruction; for his efforts he’s been awarded everything from the Pulitzer Prize to the Bancroft Prize to (you guessed it) the Lincoln Prize. So I was a little amazed when he wrote back almost immediately, to me, a veritable nobody—but then again, maybe not so amazed. (You might say it was the spirit of Lincolnian generosity in action.) Foner articulated some of the thoughts that were hanging around at the JCALA ceremony: that Lincoln seems to embody certain “quintessentially American” values, that he presided over the destruction of chattel slavery, that he provides a nostalgic alternative to our own unsatisfactory political leaders (those cojones again). All true enough, and I read his email through to what felt like a satisfying and elucidating conclusion: “Lincoln’s career raises issues that are still with us today—the relation of federal and state power, the definition of citizenship, the balance between force and consent in political allegiance, the possibilities of racial equality. As long as these questions bedevil our society, Lincoln will seem ‘relevant.’”

Bedeviled—I felt that way, after the ceremony, as the JCALA dispersed and I took the bus across town, back to my apartment. (Lincoln’s funeral train once moved in the same direction through Jersey City, to the Hudson River, where his body was borne across the water to Manhattan.) We were due for a snowstorm and I wanted to get home. But that feeling of bedevilment sank in, and when I hunkered down in my place that night, ready for the storm, I was still thinking of the ceremony. Who should it have been—Whitman or Melville? I wasn’t sure this was the right question, but I was stuck with the sense there was some question about the meaning of that day. (Then I had a Nick Carraway moment and remembered it was my birthday, too. Of course, of course: if there was a question at all, it wasn’t posed that afternoon at the wreath-laying ceremony, but on some other February twelfth, years earlier . . . and I saw that cardboard portrait, the kind of oval-shaped decoration you see in elementary school classrooms, the one that would appear in our home every year around this time, hanging from the inside of the front door, peering into our living room, the sad dark visage who shared my birthday and my mother’s birthday and seemed to beckon out from the other side of America’s most famous death, beckoning from the fate that awaited me and my mom and everyone born on every single day ever . . . )

But wait—how about Langston Hughes? I thought of his austere little meditation “Lincoln Monument: Washington.” I still prefer Jersey City’s human-scaled Lincoln the Mystic, but if you’ve seen the dc memorial at night, free from the swarming tourists and the daytime bustle, you know the lonesomeness of it:

Let’s go see Old Abe
Sitting in the marble and the moonlight,
Sitting lonely in the marble and the moonlight,
Quiet for ten thousand centuries, old Abe.
Quiet for a million, million years.

Quiet—

And yet a voice forever
Against the
Timeless walls
Of time—
Old Abe.

That was it: quiet but a voice forever. How perfect. The poem enacts the weird allure I couldn’t quite understand, the compulsion to “go see Old Abe,” as I did that day in Jersey City and the JCALA has done for generations and so many poets have tried to do on the page. But then it enacts the next part: we approach Lincoln as if he were an oracle, and ask why, and the question dies in the stillness, and there is nothing but “the marble and the moonlight” and the desolate quiet.

But despite the quiet, there he is: “a voice forever.”

I wondered how such a poem would have been received at the ceremony, after the Pledge of Allegiance and “America the Beautiful,” before the mayor with his canned remarks and the police color guard with their spears-and-banners and the refreshments from Dunkin’ Donuts.

Maybe that’s no good, I thought. Maybe it was better there was no poem. And I thought of Whitman hollowed by the news and already reaching for something to write with; and Melville bundling his poem up with the others and hoping they might form a raft, and that it would float; and the cardboard portrait on the inside front door closed against the February dusk; and I thought of him there, that night, in the park across town: our inscrutable president, with a new wreath strapped to his chest, passing through another year, waiting for the snow to fall.