Lincoln & other poems — Reading Companion

The Man and the Common Clay

The Lincoln poem, which opens the volume, works through a sustained metaphor of creation: the Norn-Mother takes "the tried clay of the common road" and mixes it with "a strain of prophecy" and laughter. The resulting man "matched the mountains" and compelled "the stars to look our way." This is not a biographical portrait but a mythological one—Lincoln becomes a figure who reconciles earth and heaven, the ordinary and the transcendent. The poem's diction is deliberately rough-hewn: "the color of the ground was in him, the red earth; / The tang and odor of the primal things." Markham insists on Lincoln's rootedness in physical, elemental America even as he elevates him to a national icon. The poem was read at the Republican Club of New York City in 1900, a fact that underscores its public, ceremonial function. Yet within the collection, this opening piece establishes a pattern: the poet repeatedly seeks the universal within the local, the eternal within the momentary.

Small Creatures, Large Questions

Several poems turn their attention to animals, using them as occasions for philosophical reflection. In "The Lizard," the speaker sits "with Aristotle on my knees" when a lizard appears—"the little hermit of the place"—and the encounter becomes a meditation on tradition versus instinct. The lizard "has no law but heart's desire" and "touches higher truth, / The circle of eternal youth," while the speaker, burdened by books, feels himself "halt" and "mean of birth." The poem sets learned authority against living presence. Similarly, "The Humming Bird" is a brief, almost weightless lyric: the bird appears as "a sudden whir of eager sound," touches a rose, and is gone. The speaker asks the rose what message was delivered: "Delight foretold, or hope deferred?" The question is left unanswered. These poems do not moralize; they register a quality of attention that the public poems sometimes lack, and they suggest that Markham's most precise observations occur at the margins of his grander themes.

Motion and Stillness in the Western Landscape

"The Round-Up" offers a different kind of nature poem—one of speed, noise, and collective movement. The poem follows cattle drivers down canyons, through "the poppy-hung hollow," past startled swallows and echoing cliffs. Its lines are driven by exclamation and imperative: "Speed, speed, leave the brooks to their potter and prattle; / Sweep on with the thunder and surge of the cattle." The landscape is rendered in quick, sensory strokes: "wild mustard splashes the slope with yellow," "a loud bird high on a tamarack hushes." Yet the poem ends in stillness: camp under sycamores, fingers on a guitar, "stars and the dream of a summer night." This movement from violent motion to quiet reflection mirrors the collection's own rhythm, as Markham shifts from public declamation to private meditation. The western setting—canyons, cedars, chaparral—grounds the poem in a specific geography, one that appears also in "A Mendocino Memory" and gives the volume a regional texture alongside its national ambitions.

Readers coming to this collection for the Lincoln poem will find it surrounded by work that tests the same themes in smaller, more intimate registers. Markham's voice is most distinctive when it slows down—watching a lizard, listening for a hummingbird's message, following cattle into the dusk. The public poems speak to their moment; the private ones speak to the craft of attention. Approach the volume as a record of a poet working across scales, from the national to the nearly invisible.

I keep thinking about how Markham finds such quiet dignity in a hummingbird’s flight, that sense of something sacred tucked into the ordinary. It reminded me of the old Celtic voices, who saw the same glimmer in mist and sea—Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry — Story, Setting & Ideas carries that same gentle hush, as if the world were whispering something we almost understand.