The Suicide Poem

By
Joshua Wolf Shenk

On August 25, 1838, the Sangamo Journal, a four-page Whig newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, carried its usual mixture of ads, news, and editorials. Wallace & Diller's Drug and Chemical Store had just received a fresh supply of sperm oil, fishing rods, and French cologne. L. Higby, the town collector, gave notice that all citizens must pay their street tax or face "trouble." Atop the news page, the paper carried an unsigned poem, thirty-six lines long. The poem, which is typical of the era, in its sentiment and morbidness, stands out now for two reasons: first, its subject is suicide (the title of the poem is "The Suicide's Soliloquy"); second, its author was most likely a twenty-nine-year-old politician and lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.

The reputed existence of a "suicide poem" has lurked in the background of Lincoln scholarship since shortly after the President's death, in 1865, when his close friend Joshua Speed mentioned it to Lincoln's law partner and biographer William Herndon. At least twice, at the ages of twenty-six and thirty-one, Lincoln had expressed thoughts of suicide seriously enough to alarm his friends. Speed was certain that Lincoln had published the poem in the Journal, but he wasn't sure about the date. It might have been 1840 or 1841 or-Speed said finally-1838. Yet two early biographies based on Herndon's research dated the missing poem to the summer of 1841. They assumed it had followed Lincoln's second suicidal breakdown, known to historians as the "fatal first of January."

For more than a century, then, scholars have been looking for the poem in the wrong place. And the man who wound up finding it wasn't looking for it at all. Since 1990, Richard Lawrence Miller, an independent scholar who supports himself by painting houses, answering phones, and dog sitting, has been at work on a multivolume biography of Lincoln's life in Illinois. He has combed through eleven years' worth of Sangamo Journals. He first came upon "The Suicide's Soliloquy" several years ago. He says that he thought, "Isn't this interesting? It's the same topic that Lincoln wrote a poem about." Miller photocopied the poem, and moved on.

In the fall of 2002, however, he happened across Speed's reference to 1838. "I thought, Wait a minute. That's long before the 'fatal first' episode," Miller said the other day, from his home in Kansas City.

Miller went back and studied "The Suicide's Soliloquy." He found that it has the same meter as Lincoln's other published verse, with characteristic references, syntax, diction, and tone. It fit the date given by Speed. Announcing the find in the spring, 2004, newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Miller wrote, "We might be justified in wondering if the mystery of Lincoln's 'suicide' poem may now be solved."

Though this news was delivered with academic equanimity, many Lincoln scholars believe that the poem is indeed the real thing. "It looks like Lincoln. It sounds like Lincoln. It probably is Lincoln," Harold Holzer, the co-chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, said last week. "I don't have many doubts that Lincoln wrote this," Douglas Wilson, the author of "Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln," said.

Given the contentious, exhaustive nature of Lincoln studies, it's hardly surprising that not everyone is convinced. "He very probably did write about suicide at some point," David Herbert Donald, a professor emeritus of history at Harvard and the author of numerous books on Lincoln, said. "But I'm not ready to attribute this specific poem to him."

The poem is written in the voice of a tortured, lonely soul who comes to the bank of the Sangamon River:

Yes! I've resolved the deed to do,
And this the place to do it:
This heart I'll rush a dagger through
Though I in hell should rue it!

Even if one takes into account the appetite for melodrama in Lincoln's day, the last two stanzas of the poem are startling:

Sweet steel! Come forth from out your sheath,
And glist'ning, speak your powers;
Rip up the organs of my breath,
And draw my blood in showers!

I strike! It quivers in that heart
Which drives me to this end;
I draw and kiss the bloody dart,
My last-my only friend!

"I think the poem will tell us something about Lincoln, but the question is, What?" Wilson said. "It recalls Eliot's idea that every new work affects the whole order. This poem is like a new chair in the room. Once you get the poem in the room, you have to rearrange all the other furniture."

"It's like finding an unknown Vermeer," Holzer said. "Or it's like finding the little Michelangelo statue in the French consulate. Nobody ever suggested that it's the true flower of his genius. It's basically a student piece. But, still, there it is."

Copyright © 2004 Condé Nast Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Originally published in The New Yorker. www.newyorker.com. Reprinted by permission.