the borrowed poem

There is a poem that Abraham Lincoln loved. He loved it the way some men love whiskey or cold weather or a love interest who got away —completely, inconveniently, for the rest of his life.

He recited it at parties. He recited it to friends who had not asked. He recited it in letters to acquaintances who had merely asked about his family and received, in addition to news that Mary and the boys were well, twelve stanzas of Scottish verse about the inevitability of death. One imagines them setting down the letter slowly, blinking, checking the envelope to make sure it had been addressed to them.

At gatherings, when the room had grown quiet enough, he would begin:

Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, He passes from life to his rest in the grave.

Not exactly sunshine and roses. An odd party trick, perhaps, but this was Honest Abe.

He did not perform it. He did not orate. By all accounts, he simply said the words—slowly, plainly, as if reminding himself of something he already knew but needed to hear again. When he finished, the room would stay quiet a moment longer than was comfortable. The kind of silence where you suddenly become aware of your own breathing.

Of course, someone, eventually, would ask the question: Did you write that?

In other words, should we be worried about you?

Lincoln would shake his head. "I would give all I am worth," he reportedly said, "to be able to write so fine a piece."

This was not false modesty. Lincoln was one of the finest writers in American history, and he had some real bangers: the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address, not to mention dozens of personal letters of such compressed grace that scholars still study their rhythm.

The man could write. He knew this poem was not his.

But here is the strange part: he did not know whose it was.

The poem had arrived in Lincoln's life in the early 1830s, when he was young and poor and living in New Salem, Illinois. A friend—a doctor named Jason Duncan—had given it to him, probably clipped from a newspaper. It had no author's name attached. No title page, no attribution, no return address. Just the words themselves, arriving like a stranger who knocks on your door in the middle of the night and says exactly what you needed to hear.

It stayed with him, because Lincoln memorized it. All twelve stanzas, fifty-six lines. He carried it with him for the rest of his life—through his years as a lawyer in Springfield, through his failed Senate campaigns, through his unlikely rise to the presidency, through the long, costly hemorrhage of the Civil War.

He recited it after the death of Ann Rutledge, the young woman he may or may not have loved before he met Mary Todd. He recited it during the war years, when casualty reports arrived daily and the nation seemed determined to tear itself apart. He recited it, by some accounts, in the final weeks of his life—still not knowing where it had come from.

Today, finding the original source is a task that could be knocked out by a skilled librarian in an afternoon. But in Lincoln’s time, this was no small feat.

Lincoln was one of the most famous men in America. He had access to libraries, to scholars, to the accumulated literary knowledge of the nineteenth century. He asked friends. He wrote letters to acquaintances with connections to the publishing world. He searched what archives were available to a man who was also running a war and trying to hold a fracturing nation together.

Nothing.

The poem had done what poems sometimes do: slipped its leash, drifted loose from its author, passed from reader to reader until no one remembered where it had started. It had become a ghost. Beautiful, haunting, and entirely untraceable.

The newspapers, meanwhile, had made up their minds. They began publishing the poem under Lincoln's name. He was the president, after all, and he was the one always reciting it. The attribution seemed reasonable enough.

Lincoln corrected them when he could. "I would not willingly take credit for what I did not write," he said. But he could not tell them who should get the credit. He did not know.

Picture this: the president of the United States, perhaps the most celebrated writer ever to hold the office, publicly admitting that his favorite poem had arrived in his life like a stray dog—no collar, no tags, just showing up at the door one day and refusing to leave. He had no idea where it came from. He had spent decades fruitlessly trying to find out.

The author, as it turns out, was a man named William Knox.

If that name means nothing to you, don't worry. Evidently, it meant nothing to almost anyone by the time Lincoln was searching for it. Knox had been dead for decades. His books were out of print. The small literary reputation he had built in his lifetime had long since crumbled into dust.

But rewind the clock. Go back to the early 1800s, to a farm in Roxburghshire, Scotland—sheep country, green and wet and wind-scoured, the kind of landscape that either produces poets, philosophers, or people too cold and tired to write anything.

William Knox was still warm enough to make some headway.

By his early twenties, he had moved to Edinburgh, joined the literary circles, and begun publishing verse. He was talented—genuinely talented. The critics said so. Sir Walter Scott said so, which in early-nineteenth-century Scotland was roughly equivalent to a papal blessing. Knox had every reason to believe he was on his way.

But talent, as many of us learn, is not the same as arrival. And "on your way" is not the same as "there."

Knox's books sold modestly. His reviews were respectful, but he remained confined to a paltry insignificance. He was the kind of poet who got invited to the second-best parties—appreciated, welcomed, never quite the reason anyone came. Scott, who had befriended him, later wrote that Knox "became too soon his own master, and plunged into dissipation and ruin." The drinking caught up with him. His health failed. In November 1825, he suffered a stroke and died a few days later. He was thirty-six years old.

It was a shame. His books went out of print almost immediately. His name faded from conversation, then from memory, then from everything. By the time a tall, melancholy lawyer in Illinois was reciting "Mortality" to crowds who had never heard of William Knox, the poet had been gone for decades and remembered by almost no one.

So why am I telling you this?

A man spends his whole short life trying to be remembered. He writes, he publishes, he hopes. He dies young, unfinished, his ambitions drowned in whiskey and bad luck. The world forgets him almost immediately. His books disappear. His name vanishes. Within a generation, it is as if he had never existed.

And yet.

And yet, somehow, one poem—just one—slips through. It crosses an ocean. It passes from hand to hand, shedding its author's name along the way. It drifts for years, untethered, until it lands in the memory of a gangly young man in Illinois who will one day hold a nation together through its worst crisis.

That young man memorizes it. He carries it for thirty years. He recites it to rooms full of people who have never heard of William Knox, who will never hear of William Knox, who do not know that the words they are hearing came from a Scottish poet who died obscure and largely forgotten in Edinburgh.

And truthfully, for me, it was never really about Knox, or even the poem's Ecclesiastean meditation on death. It was about meaning—life-shaping meaning—that had once taken form in language, drifting loose, and remarkably finding a home again.

Finally, late in the Civil War, someone in the audience recognized the poem. They told Lincoln who had written it. They sent him a collection of Knox's work. This guy was probably my dad in another life.

So after all those years, Lincoln finally had an answer. The mystery was solved. And within months, he was dead too—shot at Ford's Theatre, his own mortality no longer a philosophical question.

The poem survived them both.

Shall we give Knox an elegy too? Poor Knox, we might say. He worked so hard and the world forgot him anyway.

But I'm not sure that's the right response.

Because the poem did not die. Knox's name vanished, but his words did not. They traveled farther than he ever did, reached more people than he ever met, and lodged themselves in the heart of one of the most important figures in American history. Lincoln carried that poem for three decades. He died still carrying it.

Knox never knew. He couldn't have known. He died like Van Gogh, thinking he had failed, that his work would disappear, that he had reached for something and missed. He had no idea that across an ocean, his words were just beginning their real life.

This is how wisdom actually works. Not as a monologue, but as a relay race.

Someone writes the poem. Someone else finds it, loves it, memorizes it. Someone else hears it recited and writes it down. Someone else passes it to a friend. And on and on, across oceans and centuries and the vast indifferent machinery of time, until the words land somewhere they are needed.

We celebrate the original speakers—the poets, the philosophers, the great minds who first put truth into words. And we should. But we forget that those words almost always nearly died. They survived because someone else—someone with no particular fame, no authorship credit, no guaranteed place in the history books—loved them enough to repeat them. Loved them enough to be a little annoying about it at parties.

Lincoln was not the author of "Mortality." He was something almost as important: he was the reason it did not disappear.

I think about this at year's end.

The lesson is to actively love the words that echo through you.

The Mayfly Letter is not, in any meaningful sense, original. I freely admit that its wisdom and form here are borrowed—gathered from old books, forgotten speeches, stories most people have never heard. My job is not to invent the new, to make much of my own name, but instead to highlight and underscore the great words and ideas that we inherit from those who came before.

I just think it is a worthy yet undervalued version of doing history. Our world prizes novelty, asking "what have you made?"  when it means "what have you made that no one has made before?" But to me, the chain of transmission is the whole point.

You may never write the poem. Most of us won't. But you might be the reason it survives.

So, again, remember to actively love the words that echo through you.

The question at the end of a year—or a life—is not only "what did I create?" It is also: What did I carry? What did I refuse to let disappear? What hard-won truths did I love enough to pass on?

William Knox died at thirty-six, thinking he had failed. But his words have now outlived him by two hundred years—because one reader in Illinois loved them, memorized them, and would not let them go.

And so, though macabre, they live on here, inheriting yet another shade of meaning. Passed to you. Another link in a chain that started in Scotland two centuries ago and has not yet ended.

John

Thanks for reading The Mayfly Letter.

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad