'The Sum of All the Losses'

Abraham Lincoln was six feet, four inches tall, making him the tallest of U.S. presidents (LBJ was half an inch shorter). The crown of his trademark top hat – a stovepipe, it was called -- measured twelve inches in height. Allowing for the silk hat settling on his head, the hatted president would have been nearly seven feet tall. Historians calculate that the average height of a Civil War soldier was five feet eight. 

The hat Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater is now in the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Lincoln added the black silk mourning band after the death of his youngest son, Willie, in 1862. In “Lincoln’s Hat,” the American poet Herbert Morris (1928-2001) begins by disparaging biography if we’re looking for insights into a historical figure (or perhaps anyone). It “will be to no avail / none whatever.” Rather:

 

“Look, instead, to the edges, to the borders,

where a thing is itself but something more

(always somehow becoming something more),

to the peripheral, the inadvertent,

something no doubt at first glance partly missed,

or wholly missed, in our hunger to search

that face for clues, to take that map of anguish

(slowly, carefully) in one’s hands and read it . . .”

 

Look for insights in Lincoln’s “borders”; for example, “perhaps, the hat, / that hat by which, two blocks away, a stranger / might know, gait aside, who it was approaching.” Morris weaves into his poem a letter a child might have written to Lincoln. She asks why he wears such a hat, “which seems to all but hide your face beneath it,” and adds:

 

“My three little brothers, Momma and me

are of one mind in this--we take true pride

in you as President. You are a good man.

Yrs. truly. [P. S. Momma says to tell you

Poppa is fighting with the Union forces

at Petersburg and he thinks likewise too.]

We remember you each night in our prayers.”

 

Herbert includes no reply from the president. As usual, his blank verse recalls Henry James’ late prose, as in The American Scene (1906). The style is halting, endlessly qualifying, as though revealing the effort it takes to articulate the speaker’s thought. The final section of the poem’s 124 lines is grim, with Willie’s death, Mary Todd Lincoln’s torment and the ever-growing list of war casualties:

 

‘. . . muttering to herself,

to him, of the frightful burden of evil

in the world, o the weight of it, of darkness

falling, falling, forever falling, of how

no grief, no mourning, none, proves quite sufficient,

ever, to match the sum of all the losses,

those suffered yesterday and, worse, much worse,

losses yet to be suffered, still to come).

The blackness rises, rises slowly, straight up,

undermining those definitions, rising,

having to do with inadvertence, edges,

borders, peripheries, those preconceptions

we carried here with us, making us question

what part, biographer, is hat, pure hat,

pure real but imagined hat, what part,

rising, rising, immense, blacker than black

(more than one knows what to do with), is Lincoln.”

  

His law partner and biographer, William H. Herndon, wrote that Lincoln was “a curious – mysterious – quite an incomprehensible man.”

 

[Morris published “Lincoln’s Hat” in the Winter 1987 issue of The Hudson Review and collected it in The Little Voices of the Pears (1989).]