Answer: "The Raven."
Why did Lincoln love "The Raven"? This reinforces my mental image of Lincoln: gloomy. But everyone loves "The Raven," even cheerful school kids.
With no crosses, just 8 spaces, I guessed "Invictus." How bad of a guess is that? Seems like something a politician/statesman would embrace — "unconquerable soul," "bloody, but unbowed," "master of my fate," "captain of my soul."
But it's a bad guess once you know it was written in 1875, 10 years after Lincoln's death. I'm not conquered or bowed by my ignorance of the publication date of "Invictus," but it matters to me if better understanding of the mind of Lincoln would have told me he wouldn't like that sort of thing. He's more of a "Raven" guy.
A better wrong guess would be "Mortality" — AKA "Oh, Why Should the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud?" — because there is some evidence that Lincoln actually did carry it in his pocket and memorize it. But "Mortality" is 9 letters.
It's also awful: "The thoughts we are thinking, our fathers would think/From the death we are shrinking, our fathers would shrink/To the life we are clinging, they also would cling/But it speeds from us all like a bird on the wing." Terrible!
Carrying poems in one's pocket means little today, when they're all in your iPhone, but what poems are people memorizing? Leaving song lyrics to the side — because those are memorized automatically, whether you want them furnishing your mind* or not — have you memorized any poems? Perhaps you have memorized "The Raven" or "Invictus."
Surely not "Mortality"... about which Lincoln said, "I would give all I am worth, and go into debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is."
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* My use of the word "furnish" was influenced by my reading, long ago, of Nicholson Baker's "The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber" (commission earned):
Of a character named Keith in South Wind, Norman Douglas writes, “He had an encyclopaedic turn of mind; his head, as somebody once remarked, was a lumber-room of useless information.”
Norman Douglas’s “somebody” was probably Lord Chesterfield, who in 1748 advised his son that “Many great readers load their memories without exercising their judgments, and make lumber-rooms of their heads, instead of furnishing them usefully.”
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36 comments:
When I was in AFROTC we all had to memorize If by Kipling.
"When I was in AFROTC we all had to memorize If by Kipling."
Thinking of "Invictus" seems to cause one to think about "If," though not in the case of a crossword, "if" being so obviously shorter than 8 letters.
But "If" was written even later than "Invictus," 30 years after the death of Lincoln.
I think the poem he really carried around was:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
McClellan sucks donkey dick,
Why won't he fight when I want him to?
CC, JSM
"The giraffe is disappearing from the world
Without a trace.
Who are we to say it looks like a rocking chair
Running in a dream?
Think of a girl that has six fingers on one hand.
You must let that strange hand
Touch you."
That's an approximation of a poem I used to carry in my wallet for many years, but have since lost track of. I thought it was a wonderful thing. My other favorite lately is Philip Larkin's "This is the Verse":
"They f**k you up, your Mom and Dad,
They may not mean to but they do;
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were f**ked up in their turn
By fools in foppy hats and coats,
Who were half the time soppy-stern
And half at each other's throats.
Man hands on misery to man;
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself."
There once was a Lady from Kass
Whose pants were made out of brass
She said they don't tear
There's no doubt that they'll wear
But they sure are hard on the pocketbook
I memorized "IF" and the "Raven". Also charge of the Light brigade which thrilled the 6th grade class when I read it. We had to read one "great poem" in front of the class. Sadly, its all downhill since then.
@stan
The giraffe is disappearing
from the world
without a word.
Who are we to say its legs
are mismatched
and look as if they are on backwards
How it runs graceful as a rocking chair
escaping in a dream
Think of a lovely girl who has
six fingers
on one of her hands.
You must let that strange hand
Touch you.
The writer is Tom Tolnay.
It was easily found by Grok.
Abe Lincoln - Bad Literary critic. Good Person.
Edmund Wilson - Great literary critic. Terrible person.
Ability to judge great literature = no correlation to worth as a human being.
Interesting that Stan forgot some things but added "without a trace," which is a cliche, unlike "without a word."
Although... what word would you expect from a giraffe, disappearing or doggedly surviving.
Do giraffes even make one of those what-does-the-X-say animal "words" like "oink" and "cockadoodledoo"?
"In A Study in Scarlet [the novel that introduced Sherlock Holmes], when Dr. Watson expresses shock that Sherlock Holmes is ignorant of the Copernican theory (that the Earth travels around the Sun), Holmes explains that he considers a person's brain to be like a "little empty attic" that one must stock only with furniture (knowledge) that is useful for their work." from Google's AI
Roses are red
Violets are blue
My wife's in the bathtub
With piss on her shoe
I read about Althouse and Meade
This morning are mostly agreed
That the woman is bats
Who was scared by the rats
And went in the bathtub and peed.
The writer is Tom Tolnay.
What's the title? I can't find it at all.
I’d have expected a poem about reuniting with your deceased children in heaven. Children were not guaranteed a long life in the 19th century, but to lose two* of four sons, one while you are President and thus have access to (in theory) the very best doctors, seems to have hit him very hard.
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* And a third died after his father, in 1871. Only one out of four sons lived to adulthood.
"Poem so beloved by Abraham Lincoln that he carried it in his pocket and memorized it."
I call bullshit. If he memorized it why would he have to carry it in his pocket, or vice versa?
Anyway, most of the poems I’ve memorized don’t even have titles, and begin with “There was a young lady….”
Grok gave me a link: https://mainecrimewriters.com/2017/08/07/thanking-the-mentor/
There, the poet is referred to as Thomas Williams (publishing in Esquire). I confronted Grok and it admitted getting the name wrong!
Stan, I also have Phillip Larkins' "This Be The Verse" stuck in my head, along with two others that lodged there in my 20s (I just turned 60). One is another Larkins poem, "The Life With A Hole In It", which is somewhat autobiographical, since Larkins himself found a compromise life in which he worked as a librarian to make ends meet so he could write poetry (not having been born wealthy like the "shit in the shuttered chateau") and had a longtime girlfriend but managed not to marry or have kids.
Here's that poem:
When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you've always done what you want,
You always get your own way
- A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that's been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I've never done what I don't.
So the shit in the shuttered chateau
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay) . . .
Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.
What I love about both poems is that they fully acknowledge the grim side of life, but with such gleeful precision and energy that they end up being oddly cheerful, at least to me.
The other poem that's still stuck in my head is Thomas Hardy's "A Broken Appointment".
"I call bullshit. If he memorized it why would he have to carry it in his pocket, or vice versa?"
When memorizing a poem, you have to practice a lot and keep going back to the text to make sure you get every word right. It's amazing how long it can take to get the last few prepositions or the lines that start with "but" or "and."
Eventually you have the poem and don't need the paper, but you still need to brush up or you'll lose words.
In any case, I've seen video showing the 6 items Lincoln had in his pockets when he was assassinated. None of them were writing on paper... unless you count the cash (one Confederate bill).
My favorite Larkin poem is
“Myxomatosis
Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.”
So cool to get a poem out of a rabbit disease. I almost know it by heart, but not quite. Maybe I should carry it in my pocket.
I love The Raven so, so much. I'm sure my reading of it is in the hundreds. And I'm still finding new things when reading it.
"But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour."
Perfect.
"Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
That line always gets me.
I shall read it again tonight.
Thanks, Ann. I Googled the poem many times, but never got an answer, so thanks Grok! Tom Tolnay, hmm. I saw the poem in something like the New Yorker, or Atlantic perhaps. It always stuck with me.
Williams' poem starts out affecting a fine appreciation of and concern for the noble giraffe, but quickly becomes distracted fantasizing about a kinky hand job.
Perhaps the title should be 'Liberal with ADD'.
I've memorized a few poems by Robert Frost, including "The Dust of Snow" and "Nothing Gold Can Stay". As I grow closer to retirement age, these lines from "After Apple-Picking" resonate with me:
"For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired."
The protagonist of "Moonwalking With Einstein" used a familiar room or home as a template for memorizing things. Each word or number or object to be remembered is mentally placed somewhere in the familiar room, and when you need to remember it, you simply take a mental stroll through the room where you'll find it sitting where you put it.
The trouble with a kitten is that,
Eventually, it becomes a cat.
" Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods,"
Macaulay, "Horatius" Lays of Ancient Rome.
Read it to the kids, along with the Iliad and much, much else etc. It answers the necessary "why live" with the much more specific "how to die".
Its also a definition of conservatism in six lines of verse.
"Thanks, Ann. I Googled the poem many times, but never got an answer, so thanks Grok! Tom Tolnay, hmm."
Turns out it was Tom Williams.
"I saw the poem in something like the New Yorker, or Atlantic perhaps."
It was Esquire.
Cool poem. I liked it a lot
Reading poetry to your children seems old fashioned, but I'm convinced that got all ours into the University of California and one of them a summa cum laude. And as educational "enrichment" goes its ridiculously cheap, vs Kumon Math tutoring for instance, which I also recommend.
Henley was a late Victorian (more or less), so Lincoln wouldn't have had the opportunity to read "Invictus." I was going to say that the late Victorians were more depressed and more anxious about the fate of the Empire, the country, and their souls than the early Victorians, but Lincoln, Poe, Tennyson, Darwin, and Gogol' were all born in the same year. 1809 -- a banner year for depressives and neurotics.
"Thanatopsis" might have been a good guess. Too many letters, I guess. Lincoln admired William Cullen Bryant. They met and corresponded. Bryant's paper endorsed Lincoln and he served as an elector. Like Whitman, Bryant eulogized Lincoln in his poems.
I have Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet 43 by heart, and can reel it off at the drop of a hat. It always makes a good impression.
When my heart was broken sophomore year, I memorized lots of sad love poetry and swanned around mourning with Byron's "When we two parted in silence and tears....".
Funny, I also loved Swinburne's Garden of Proserpine, but to this day, after looking back at it many times to fix it in my mind, I always remember "even the weariest river
/ Winds somewhere safe to sea." as somewhere HOME to sea. Tennyson was also a favorite to learn.
Not exactly poetry, but I memorized lots of Much Ado, mostly the insults thrown between Beatrice and Benedict. Then there is "The Lady's Not for Burning" Christopher Fry's wonderfully lyrical play.
"Raven" is just a conspiratorial gathering of "never more" quotes.
Lot of Burns, Kipling and Service.
There's a limerick in there somewhere.
When you're lost in the wild
On Afghanistan's plain
And fulla wee beasties in Scotland
Life is a pain.
The night was dark, the sky was blue,
Around the corner the shit-wagon flew . . .
"Safe in their alabaster chambers
Untouched by Morn, untouched by Noon,
The meek members of the Resurrection lie
Rafter of satin, roof of stone.
"Grand go the ages above tthem
... arcs ...
Diadems drop and Doges surrender
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow."
Well, that's one poem by Emily Dickinson, I memorized and have somewhat forgot. But the bits I remember (see above) I quote to myself in wintertime looking out at snow falling on snow.
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