At The Corner this morning John J. Miller notes Abraham Lincoln’s birthday tomorrow and directs readers to a fantastic piece he has in today’s Wall Street Journal titled “With Death on His Mind” which reveals the history of our 16th president’s favorite poem:
After a while, Lincoln set down the book. “There is a poem that has been a great favorite with me for years,” he said. Then he closed his eyes and declaimed 56 lines. He knew the words, but nothing else of the poem. “I would give a great deal,” he said, “to know who wrote it, but I never could ascertain.”
The author was William Knox and the title was “Mortality,” though it was perhaps better known by its first line, “O why should the spirit of mortal be proud!” The theme is death, the great leveler that touches saints and sinners, kings and beggars, parents and children. Today, poet and poem would be almost entirely forgotten but for their connection to Lincoln.
Here’s the complete poem. Indeed, it’s an extraordinary work:
Mortality
1 O why should the spirit of mortal be proud!
2 Like a fast flitting meteor, a fast flying cloud,
3 A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave –
4 He passes from life to his rest in the grave.
5 The leaves of the oak and the willows shall fade,
6 Be scattered around, and together be laid;
7 And the young and the old, and the low and the high,
8 Shall moulder to dust, and together shall lie.
9 The child that a mother attended and loved,
10 The mother that infant’s affection that proved,
11 The husband that mother and infant that blest,
12 Each — all are away to their dwelling of rest.
13 The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose eye,
14 Shone beauty and pleasure — her triumphs are by:
15 And the memory of those that beloved her and praised,
16 Are alike from the minds of the living erased.
17 The hand of the king that the sceptre hath borne,
18 The brow of the priest that the mitre hath worn,
19 The eye of the sage, and the heart of the brave,
20 Are hidden and lost in the depths of the grave.
21 The peasant whose lot was to sow and to reap,
22 The herdsman who climbed with his goats to the steep,
23 The beggar that wandered in search of his bread,
24 Have faded away like the grass that we tread.
25 The saint that enjoyed the communion of Heaven,
26 The sinner that dared to remain unforgiven,
27 The wise and the foolish, the guilty and just,
28 Have quietly mingled their bones in the dust.
29 So the multitude goes — like the flower and the weed
30 That wither away to let others succeed;
31 So the multitude comes — even those we behold,
32 To repeat every tale that hath often been told.
33 For we are the same things that our fathers have been,
34 We see the same sights that our fathers have seen,
35 We drink the same stream, and we feel the same sun,
36 And we run the same course that our fathers have run.
37 The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think,
38 From the death we are shrinking from they too would shrink,
39 To the life we are clinging to they too would cling –
40 But it speeds from the earth like a bird on the wing.
41 They loved — but their story we cannot unfold;
42 They scorned — but the heart of the haughty is cold;
43 They grieved — but no wail from their slumbers may come;
44 They joyed — but the voice of their gladness is dumb.
45 They died — ay, they died! and we, things that are now,
46 Who walk on the turf that lies over their brow,
47 Who make in their dwellings a transient abode,
48 Meet the change they met on their pilgrimage road.
49 Yea, hope and despondence, and pleasure and pain,
50 Are mingled together like sunshine and rain;
51 And the smile and the tear, and the song and the dirge,
52 Still follow each other like surge upon surge.
53 Tis the twink of an eye, ’tis the draught of a breath,
54 From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,
55 From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud –
56 O why should the spirit of mortal be proud!
There’s a revealing detail in Miller’s article about the mind which composed this work, emphasis mine:
Knox was born in Scotland in 1789. A descendant of John Knox, the 16th-century Protestant reformer, he showed a flair for verse at a young age but went into farming. He wasn’t very good at it, possibly because he drank too much, and abandoned agriculture after five years. What he really wanted to do was write. His first collection of poems, “The Lonely Hearth,” appeared in 1818. Two more followed: “The Songs of Israel,” which includes “Mortality,” in 1824 and “The Harp of Zion” in 1825.
That kind of puts this pair of lines in a different context doesn’t it?
Yea, hope and despondence, and pleasure and pain / Are mingled together like sunshine and rain;
The poet here is not just describing a generalization of life — but his probable manic-depressive temperament. (See these two longer pieces I’ve written here and here based on the books of Kay Redfield Jameson, Nassir Ghaemi, and John Gartner for more on the subject of psychiatric disorders fueling the achievements of artists, politicians, and entrepreneurs.)
So too, Lincoln’s selection of this poem should not just be understood as a sentimental understanding of the President’s wisdom and character, but also a reflection of his battles with depression.
For this President’s Day coming up, I think I’ll start this book (which has been waiting patiently in my piles for a few weeks): Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. Anybody read it and have an opinion?
The poem is a thing of beauty, thanks for sharing it in its entirety.
Where can one find these collections?
“The Lonely Hearth ”
“The Songs of Israel ”
“The Harp Of Zion ”
What sort of a person was William Knox ? Is there a biography ?
Thanks so much for posting the poem in its entirety. It’s extremely interesting that “Mortality” was a Lincoln favorite, but the work itself? It’s hard enough to avoid tedium in what is sometimes called a “list poem,” but never more so than when you’re repeating a tale that hath as often been told as, per John Miller, “death awaits all, regardless of station.”
For a truly stunning, list form, Civil War contemplation on death (which needs no Lincoln to survive), Walt Whitman’s “This Compost,” has no equal:
“1
Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.
O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?
Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
2
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person–yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once catching disease.
3
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.”
Would it surprise you to learn that Whitman’s poem is only 10 words longer than Knox’s? It’s a lot harder to memorize, though! That’s where rhymes, rhythms, short lines and stanzas come in handy.
‘course it was Douglas who was three sheets to the wind during some of the debates. (Not his fault; he didn’t have the fortitude to take the schedule.)