My Childhood Home I See Again Analysis My Childhood Home I See Again Shmoop

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

Lincoln-lovers and New Yorkers both – about an equal number –  who have not yet gone down to Madison and 36th to catch "Lincoln Speaks: Words That Transformed a Nation" will want to exercise and so, soon, before it closes on June 7th. Tracing, from adolescence on, the evolution of Lincoln's use of language, some 80 manuscripts display how he "chose words with a lawyer'south precision and poet'due south sense of rhythm." This is apt, since Lincoln was, in parts and small, both. An exceptionally rare example of his verse, in fact, is among several pieces on loan to the showroom from the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. Indeed, along with two other pieces from its drove, almost the whole of what Lincoln wrote most loss – as a teenager, a successful lawyer, and president – is on showroom. The nigh revelatory of these, and the longest, is the 1846 poem featured here…

Whether Lincoln, during the course 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 upwards in Spencer County, Indiana. This letter and accompanying poem contains then, roughly half of what the most literary of all American presidents would write on the virtually unmentioned bailiwick of his childhood. It is a seminal account, and in it, may be establish both the cause, and event, of his profound reticence.

Having grown up, every bit he writes here,  in as "unpoetical as any spot of the earth", he all the same found fifty-fifty a fleeting 1844 visit to Spencer County  "aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry." He would, then "requite all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write" as "superb" a poem as early 19th century Scottish poet William Knox'southward dirge-like "Mortality." No doubt its lugubrious references to a dead mother and child, brought to listen his own composition; and hither Lincoln, in explaining its origins, mentions the unmentionable:  those two sudden and terrible losses,  of his honey mother when he was nine,  and of his sister a  decade afterwards.

The piece of poetry of my own which I alluded to, I was led to write under the following circumstances. In the fall of 1844, thinking I might aid some to carry the State of Indiana for Mr. Clay, I went into the neighborhood in that State in which I was raised,  where my mother and just sister were buried, and from which I had been absent most xv years. That part of the country is, within itself, every bit unpoetical as any spot of the earth; simply all the same, 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 change of subjects divided the thing into four little divisions or cantos, the first only of which I send you lot now…

Lincoln mentioned but two other times, in writing, the simple fact that his female parent had died when he was boy –  and never, but here, that his sis had died as well. Indirectly, in his 1862 letter to a young woman grieving the death of her male parent in boxing, Fanny McCullough, he allowed how sorrow came to the young with bitterest desperation "because it takes them unawares" adding, "I have had experience enough to know what I say." Here, however, are Lincoln's most revealing words on the devastating losses of his adolescence – and the source, virtually likely, of  his lifelong melancholia…

My childhood home I encounter again,
And sadden with the view;
And even so, equally retentivity crowds my encephalon,
There's pleasure in it too.
O Retentiveness! one thousand midway world
'Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise…

… So retentiveness will hallow all
We've known, but know no more.

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

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

The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Immature childhood grown, potent manhood gray,
And half of all are dead.

I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could salvage,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace 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 terminal haunted photograph, he was seen as veritably dripping misery as he walked. "No element of Mr. Lincoln's character," a colleague declared, "was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy."  Why that was so, this letter and verse form suggest, was his life in Indiana, "where things decayed and loved ones lost."

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

Autograph Letter Signed ("A. Lincoln"), incorporating the Autograph Manuscript of his poem beginning "My childhood dwelling 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 Dwelling I See Once again"; his Dec 23, 1862 letter of the alphabet to Fanny McCullough; and a rare circa 1824-1826 notebook page, on which he copied some five lines of Isaac Watt's 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 City, and may be viewed there until June 7, 2015.

Manuscripts Related To This Commodity

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Source: https://www.shapell.org/historical-perspectives/between-the-lines/abraham-lincoln-autobiographical-letter-poem-childhood-home-see/

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