Abraham Lincoln: An Horatian Ode — A Closer Reading

(0 User reviews) 331

In Category - Fantasy Juvenile Worlds

Authors: Stoddard, Richard Henry, 1825-1903 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2006 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Poetry Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 4,445

Reading time 20 min

Text sections 1

Before opening Abraham Lincoln: An Horatian Ode — A Closer Reading, the edition data offers a quick orientation: 4,445 words, 20 min estimated reading time, and 1 detected text section.

The text analysis averages about 22.9 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Poetry,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #18573

Richard Henry Stoddard's 1865 ode to Abraham Lincoln employs a formal, elegiac voice and classical allusions, notably to Horace and Macbeth. The poem opens by distinguishing Lincoln's death from typical heroic falls, using measured quatrains that shift into a stunned, prophetic tone. The excerpts reveal a work structured around contrast and collective grief.

Editorial Edition Score 4.3/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg18573

Read the Text

Produced by The University of Michigan's Making of America online book collection (http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moa/).

By Richard Henry Stoddard.

Bunce & Huntington, Publishers,

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865,

By BUNCE & HUNTINGTON,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Born, Feb. 12th, 1809.

Assassinated, Good-Friday, April 14th, 1865.

"Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope The Lord's anointed temple, and stole thence The life o' the building.

"Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon:--Do not bid me speak; See, and then speak yourselves.--Awake! awake! Ring the alarum-bell:--Murder! and treason!

"Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit, And look on death itself!--up, up, and see The great doom's image!

"Our royal master's murdered!

"Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant There's nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys: renown and grace is dead; The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of.

"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well; Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, Can touch him further."

Not as when some great Captain falls In battle, where his Country calls, Beyond the struggling lines That push his dread designs

To doom, by some stray ball struck dead: Or, in the last charge, at the head Of his determined men, Who _must_ be victors then!

Nor as when sink the civic Great, The safer pillars of the State, Whose calm, mature, wise words Suppress the need of swords--

With no such tears as e'er were shed Above the noblest of our Dead Do we to-day deplore The Man that is no more!

Our sorrow hath a wider scope, Too strange for fear, too vast for hope,-- A Wonder, blind and dumb, That waits--what is to come!

Not more astounded had we been If Madness, that dark night, unseen, Had in our chambers crept, And murdered while we slept!

We woke to find a mourning Earth-- Our Lares shivered on the hearth,-- The roof-tree fallen,--all That could affright, appall!

Such thunderbolts, in other lands, Have smitten the rod from royal hands, But spared, with us, till now, Each laurelled Cesar's brow!

No Cesar he, whom we lament, A Man without a precedent, Sent, it would see, to do His work--and perish too!

Not by the weary cares of State, The endless tasks, which will not wait, Which, often done in vain, Must yet be done again:

Not in the dark, wild tide of War, Which rose so high, and rolled so far, Sweeping from sea to sea In awful anarchy:--

Four fateful years of mortal strife, Which slowly drained the Nation's life, (Yet, for each drop that ran There sprang an armed man!)

Not then;--but when by measures meet,-- By victory, and by defeat,-- By courage, patience, skill, The People's fixed _"We will!"_

Had pierced, had crushed Rebellion dead,-- Without a Hand, without a Head:-- At last, when all was well, He fell--O, _how_ he fell!

The time,--the place,--the stealing Shape,-- The coward shot,--the swift escape,-- The wife--the widow's scream,-- It is a hideous Dream!

A Dream?--what means this pageant, then? These multitudes of solemn men, Who speak not when they meet, But throng the silent street?

The flags half-mast, that late so high Flaunted at each new victory? (The stars no brightness shed, But bloody looks the red!)

The black festoons that stretch for miles, And turn the streets to funeral aisles? (No house too poor to show The Nation's badge of woe!)

The cannon's sudden, sullen boom,-- The bells that toll of death and doom,-- The rolling of the drums,-- The dreadful Car that comes?

Cursed be the hand that fired the shot! The frenzied brain that hatched the plot! Thy Country's Father slain By thee, thou worse than Cain!

Tyrants have fallen by such as thou, And Good hath followed--May it now! (God lets bad instruments Produce the best events.)

But he, the Man we mourn to-day, No tyrant was: so mild a sway In one such weight who bore Was never known before!

Cool should he be, of balanced powers, The Ruler of a Race like ours, Impatient, headstrong, wild,-- The Man to guide the Child!

And this _he_ was, who most unfit (So hard the sense of God to hit!) Did seem to fill his Place. With such a homely face,--

Continue Reading →

Richard Henry Stoddard's Abraham Lincoln: An Horatian Ode opens with a deliberate negation: the speaker insists Lincoln's death is not like that of a general falling in battle or a civic leader passing in old age. The poem's first lines set up a series of contrasts—'Not as when some great Captain falls'—that immediately establish a tone of exceptional loss. The voice is formal, almost ceremonial, using regular quatrains and a measured iambic rhythm. Yet within this controlled structure, the language shifts toward astonishment: 'A Wonder, blind and dumb, / That waits—what is to come!' The ode's subtitle and epigraph from Macbeth signal a classical and Shakespearean framework, framing Lincoln's assassination as a rupture that defies ordinary elegy.

The Rhetoric of Negation and Contrast

Stoddard builds the poem's opening through a series of negations: Lincoln's death is 'Not as when some great Captain falls' nor 'as when sink the civic Great.' Each rejected scenario is described in vivid detail—the captain struck by a stray ball, the statesman whose 'calm, mature, wise words / Suppress the need of swords'—before the speaker declares that 'no such tears' apply. This rhetorical strategy does more than set Lincoln apart; it creates a cumulative sense of dislocation. The reader is led through familiar patterns of mourning only to have them denied. The effect is to make Lincoln's death feel unprecedented, a break in the expected order. The poem's voice remains steady, almost clinical in its enumeration, which heightens the emotional impact when the tone abruptly shifts to images of domestic violation: 'Our Lares shivered on the hearth,— / The roof-tree fallen.'

Classical Allusion and the Language of Shock

The epigraph from Macbeth—'Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! / Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord's anointed temple'—establishes a vocabulary of sacrilege and cosmic disorder. Stoddard weaves this language into his own stanzas: 'Such thunderbolts, in other lands, / Have smitten the rod from royal hands.' The reference to 'Lares' (Roman household gods) and 'Cesar's brow' places Lincoln within a classical framework of rulers and portents. Yet the poem resists equating Lincoln with a Caesar; instead, he is 'A Man without a precedent.' The speaker's voice oscillates between controlled elegy and raw astonishment. Phrases like 'Too strange for fear, too vast for hope' and 'A Wonder, blind and dumb' suggest a grief that has not yet found adequate expression. The poem's formal structure—regular stanzas, end-rhyme—contains but does not fully tame this shock.

Shifts in Pace and the Unfinished Sentence

Stoddard manipulates pace through line length and punctuation. The opening quatrains are end-stopped and deliberate: 'Not as when some great Captain falls / In battle, where his Country calls.' But as the poem moves into the aftermath of assassination, the syntax becomes more fragmented. The line 'We woke to find a mourning Earth—' is followed by a dash and a series of short, appalled images: 'Our Lares shivered on the hearth,— / The roof-tree fallen,—all / That could affright, appall!' The dashes create a breathless, cumulative effect, as if the speaker cannot pause. Later, the poem shifts to a longer, more narrative passage describing 'Four fateful years of mortal strife, / Which slowly dra[wn]'—the excerpt cuts off mid-line, but the pattern suggests a return to measured reflection. This alternation between staccato shock and sustained lament gives the ode its distinctive rhythm, mirroring a mind struggling to process catastrophe.

Readers approaching Stoddard's ode should attend to its formal choices—the Horatian stanza, the Shakespearean epigraph, the deliberate negations—as keys to its emotional logic. The poem does not narrate Lincoln's life but rather captures a moment of collective grief through contrast and classical framing. Its voice is public and ceremonial, yet the fractures in syntax reveal a personal tremor. This edition preserves the original 1865 text, allowing modern readers to encounter the poem as it first appeared, with its period typography and layout intact.

Sometimes the measured grief of Stoddard’s ode—how it holds a breath for Lincoln—makes me recall a quieter, sillier book, one I found years later. The formal solemnity feels almost like a distant cousin to the playful, steady rhythm of The Diverting History of John Gilpin — Story, Setting & Ideas. Both share a peculiar, unhurried cadence, though their worlds could not differ more.