My Childhood Home I See Again

Abraham Lincoln 1809 ( Hodgenville, Kentucky, ) – 1865 (Petersen House, Washington, D.C., United States)



My childhood home I see again,
    And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
    There's pleasure in it too.

O Memory! thou midway world
    'Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
    In dreamy shadows rise,

And, freed from all that's earthly vile,
    Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle
    All bathed in liquid light.

As dusky mountains please the eye
    When twilight chases day;
As bugle-notes that, passing by,
    In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall,
    We, lingering, list its roar—
So memory will hallow all
    We've known, but know no more.

Near twenty years have passed away
    Since here I bid farewell
To woods and fields, and scenes of play,
    And playmates loved so well.

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

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

I hear the loved survivors tell
    How nought from death could save,
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.
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Submitted by halel on July 15, 2020

Modified on April 17, 2023

1:07 min read
86

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCB XXXX DEDE FGFG HIHI GJGJ CKAK GLGL JMJM LNLN
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,319
Words 222
Stanzas 10
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th president of the United States. Lincoln led the nation through its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis in the American Civil War. Throughout his life, Abraham Lincoln was an avid reader of poetry. As a teenager, however, Lincoln also began to cultivate an interest in writing poetry. Lincoln's oldest surviving verses, written when he was between fifteen and seventeen years old, are brief squibs that appear in his arithmetic book. more…

All Abraham Lincoln poems | Abraham Lincoln Books

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