Monday, March 18, AD 2024 9:37pm

Abraham Lincoln’s Ghost Walks at Midnight

Tragic is the only word to describe the life of Vachel Lindsay.  Perhaps the greatest of the poets of Illinois, he deserves his appellation the Prairie Troubador, his life was haunted by mental instability and money woes.  He committed suicide at age 52 in 1931 by drinking a bottle of Lysol.  His last words indicated the paranoia that beset him at the end:  “They tried to get me; I got them first!”

A sad life, but a great talent.  In 1914, anguished by the outbreak of World War I, he wrote this haunting homage to Lincoln:

 

 

 

(In Springfield, Illinois)

It is portentous, and a thing of state
That here at midnight, in our little town
A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,
Near the old court-house pacing up and down.
Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards
He lingers where his children used to play,
Or through the market, on the well-worn stones
He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away.
A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,
A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl
Make him the quaint great figure that men love,
The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.
He cannot sleep upon his hillside now.
He is among us:—as in times before!
And we who toss and lie awake for long
Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door.
His head is bowed. He thinks on men and kings.
Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep?
Too many peasants fight, they know not why,
Too many homesteads in black terror weep.
The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.
He sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main.
He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now
The bitterness, the folly and the pain.
He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn
Shall come;—the shining hope of Europe free;
The league of sober folk, the Workers’ Earth,
Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea.
It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,
That all his hours of travail here for men
Seem yet in vain.   And who will bring white peace
That he may sleep upon his hill again?
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Mary De Voe
Thursday, October 30, AD 2014 11:22am

Vachel Lindsay: Had he truly followed Abraham Lincoln.

Ginny
Ginny
Thursday, October 30, AD 2014 6:29pm

Perhaps the following thoughts of Donald Hankey, an English soldier, written from the trenches on June 1, 1915, would be an antidote to the pathos of Vachel Lindsay:

“I have seen with the eyes of God. I have seen the naked souls of men, stripped of circumstance. Rank and reputation, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, manners and uncouthness, these I saw not. I saw the naked souls of men. I saw who were slaves and who were free; who were beasts and who were men; who were contemptible and who honourable. I have seen with the eyes of God. I have seen the vanity of the temporal and the glory of the eternal. I have despised comfort and honoured pain. I have understood the victory of the Cross. O Death, where is thy sting?”

Donald Hankey was killed in action on October 26, 1916.

WK Aiken
WK Aiken
Monday, November 3, AD 2014 3:23pm

Indeed, in the state immediately to the east of Our President’s Adopted Home (“Indiana, the Gateway to Illinois”) once walked and recited The Bard of Alamo (not The Alamo, but the town of Alamo, Indiana) James Buchanan Elmore.
.
His ode to that purest of Midwestern flora, “Sassafras,” is ensconced on the hearts of all who once strode the halls of Wabash College:
.
“In the spring of the year,
When the blood is too thick,
There is nothing so rare
As the sassafras stick.
It cleans up the liver,
It strengthens the heart,
And to the whole system
New life doth impart.
Sassafras, oh, sassafras!
Thou art the stuff for me!
And in the spring I love to sing,
Sweetest sassafras, of thee.”
.
In the event of over-erudition, Mr. Elmore’s compositions are a sure cure. Here are his assembled works:
.
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inauthors/view?docId=VAC0990&chunk.id=d1e931&brand=ia-books&doc.view=0&anchor.id=

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