Mary, the saddest name In all the litanies of love And all the books of fame.
-Patrick Kavanagh
My husband grows hybridized daylilies in our backyard. Among these flowers are two with nearly identical blooms; and, as is often the case, the flowers have names of people, some related to the hybridizer, others named for people of importance or celebrity. The two flowers that look so much alike are named "Mary Todd" and "Norma Jean." Each is a large yellow blossom, among the most prominent in the garden, buxom and cheerful, the plants long-blooming and hardy. Until reading Jason Emerson's collection of poems by and about Mary Todd Lincoln, I thought "Norma Jean" fit this particular daylily, while "Mary Todd" did not. Why? Because I'd bought into the notion of Mary Todd as a troubled, materialistic, difficult woman, one more of a burden than helpmate to her long-suffering and tolerant husband Abraham.
Lincoln's Lover dispels that myth for me. Through these poems, a different portrait of the former First Lady emerges, one that presents a more complex picture, more humane, of a woman not only with flaws, but strengths, a woman who raised four children, often alone, busy as her husband was, a woman who suffered unspeakable tragedy and who loved her husband, and he her, with constancy and affection.
In "Riding on a Dray," Dr. E. H. Merriman presents a young Mary hitching an undignified ride in a common wagon to avoid walking home on muddy streets. This was obviously something young ladies of Mary's social class should know better than to do. "Up flew windows, out popped heads," Merriman writes, "To see this Lady gay/In a silken cloak and feathers white/A riding on a dray." To a twenty-first-century reader, this ballad projects Mary as quite modern, a woman who knows her own mind, is practical, strong-willed, unfazed by the inevitable gossip that will mark her as unrefined. Merriman, writing this poem in 1839/40, was not particularly impressed with Mary's behavior: "A moral I'll append/To this my humble lay/When you're sticking in the mud/Why call out for a dray."
There are poems in this collection, however, whose authors have great sympathy for Mary Lincoln. George Moses Horton, in "Mrs. Lincoln's Lamentation," presents Mary's grief over the death of her husband. In this 1865 poem she laments the absence of her husband as stealing her sense of herself as a woman. Her depression is depicted metaphorically in her perception of nature:
Never more, never, hence to be a woman,
Or thus bereft of all the nature dear!
The lilies droop, the willows sadly weep,
The garden is divested of her grace;
For every scene is pendent as with grief,
And desolation spreads the city around.
"…they do not dare/To see how lovely is the pain that marks/Your face, and drove the world about you to/The brink of nothing safe or sane or heard," writes Jason Emerson in his 2009 "Epistle to Mary Lincoln." Here the poet finds the grief of a nation over the devastation of the Civil War in the face of the president's wife, a mark of compassion for her husband's difficult responsibilities and decisions.
Rather than portraying the relationship of Mary and her husband as unloving and contemptuous due to her lavish spending, unpredictable temper, and erratic behavior, these poems provide evidence of Mary's devotion to Abraham and his reciprocal love and passion for her. A letter from Lincoln himself, its poetic prose written as lines, spells out his tenderness toward her:
In this troublesome world
we are never
quite satisfied. When you were here, I thought
you hindered me some
in attending to business;
but now, having nothing but
business-no variety-
it has grown
exceedingly tasteless to me.
I hate to sit down and direct documents,
and I hate to stay
in this old room
all by myself.
And Dan Guillory delves into the sexual attraction of Mary in his unsentimental depiction of her sensuality and desirability to her husband:
She of the endless purse-
Pillager of millinery shops,
Jewelry and cutlery
Copper silver gold
Brooches pearls pins
Necklaces bracelets gems
Flimsy tulle veils whalebone
Corsets and lacework shawls.
O, she of the burning gaze
The upcurled lip
The little finger
Hooked behind my ear
That hitching-post of love,
She of the marble knees
The alabaster throat
The breasts of cool pink jade
Nippled in coral.
("Litany for Mary T.")
The erotic nature of this 2007 poem is surely something one would expect more for the beautiful temptress "Norma Jean" than for the overweight, temperamental "Mary Todd." The imagery, however, reminds one of the "Song of Solomon," lifting its sensual imagery to a spiritual plane.
Were Mary Todd Lincoln traveling the roads in early summer in Lexington, Kentucky, she would have seen scores of the common orange, gangly daylilies that grow wild in ditches along the way. She would not know that one day a daylily would be named for her, representing the bright, headstrong, loving, sexy, misunderstood woman history has failed to share with us. The intriguing poems in Lincoln's Lover attempt to correct that misconception. I, for one, have been swayed.
Maureen Morehead
Kentucky Poet Laureate
March 31, 2012
