O Father Abraham!

As the nation marks the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, it should be noted that the public image of our 16th President has largely been a creation of her poets. From the time of his assassination just seven score and four years ago, poets as varied as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Julia Ward Howe, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters have offered tributes in verse to Lincoln and his legacy.

During World War II, poet Hyam Plutzik (1911 - 1962) penned “To Abraham Lincoln, That He Walk By Day,” a 67-line narrative poem whose title is an obvious allusion to Vachel Lindsay’s “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.” Anticipating the rising tide of the civil rights movement, Plutzik’s poem is an impassioned plea on behalf of racial justice and the dignity of all Americans. Directly addressing the martyred President, Plutzik writes:

“O Father Abraham, our sleep is quite in this republic,
Nor usually do we fret about hunger and epidemic,
But daily this enormous wrong multiplies:
That men are denied the gracious and simple thing
Which your country storekeeper, your lawyer of Springfield,
Bear with them always, the dignity of man.”

Plutzik’s poem makes numerous references to the disgraceful indignities (“ugly, smug and hooded”) borne by the Negro during the era of Jim Crow segregation—a situation that Plutzik witnessed first-hand while stationed at various Army bases throughout the American South during World War II. The poem is at once polemical and elegiac, cataloging the “stink of the evil…on highway, house and shop” while mourning a forthcoming “time of remorse and agony” when “victim and doer” alike will be swallowed up. Plutzik’s declaration that such indignities “burn deep and smoulder” echoes Langston Hughes’ meditation on the “raisin in the sun,” the phrase that provided a title for the play by Lorraine Hansberry that opened on Broadway also in 1959.

Plutzik was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his long poem “Horatio,” published in 1961. In this time of new beginnings and a celebration of hope, Plutzik’s poem on Abraham Lincoln seems especially prescient.

~Edward Moran

THE POEM:

• “To Abraham Lincoln, That He Walk By Day,” by Hyam Plutzik

Edward Moran is an author and historian who specializes in literary biography. He was the literary researcher for the documentary film Hyam Plutzik: American Poet, shown recently at various film festivals, including the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.