But in this year Of ’59 you’re sunk in blackest thought About the country maybe, but, I think, About this riddle of our mortal life. You were a poet, Abraham, from your birth. That makes you think, and makes you deal at last With things material to the tune of laws Moving in higher spaces when you’re called To act--and show a poet moulding stuff Too tough for spirits practical to mould. Here are you with your feet upon the desk. You have been beaten in a cause which kept Some strings too loose to catch the vibrate waves Of a great Harp whose music you have sensed. You are a mathematician using symbols Like Justice, Truth, with keenness to perceive Disturbance of equations, a logician Who sees invariable laws, and beauty born Of finding out and following the laws. You are a Plato brooding there in Springfield. You are a poet with a voice for Truth, And never to be claimed by visionaries Who chant the theme of bread and bread alone. But here and now They want you not for Senator, it seems. You have been tossed to one side by the rush Of world events, left stranded and alone, And fitted for no use, it seems, in Springfield. A country lawyer with a solid logic, And gift of prudent phrase which has a way Of hardening under time to rock as hard As the enduring thought you seal it with. You’ve reached your fiftieth year, your occultation Should pass. If ever, we should see a light: In all your life you have not seen a city. But now our Springfield giant strides Broadway, Thrills William Cullen Bryant, sets a wonder Going about the East, that Kirkham’s grammar Can give a man such speech at Cooper Union, Which even Alfred’s, trained to Virgil’s style, Cannot disdain for matching in the thought With faultless clearness. And still in 1860 all the Brahmins Have fear to give you power. You are a backwoodsman, a country lawyer Unlettered in the difficult art of states. A denizen of a squalid western town, Dowered with a knack of argument alone, Which wakes the country school-house, and may lift Its devotees to Congress by good fortune. But then at Cooper Union intuitive eyes Had measured your tall frame, and careful speech, Your strength and self-possession. Then they came With that dramatic sense which is American Into the hall with rails which you had split, And called you Honest Abe, and wearing badges With your face on them and the poor catch words Of Honest Abe, as if you were a referee Like Honest Kelly, when in truth no man Had ever been your intimate, ever slapped you With brisk familiarity, or called you Anything but Mr. Lincoln, never Abe, or Abraham, and never used The Hello Bill of salutation to you-- O great patrician, therefore fit to be