Like everything else he took to, Abraham Lincoln was a self-trained as a poet. He started at the task during boyhood, often using verse for satirical purposes. Here, however, is a selection from his more somber 1846 piece "My Child-Hood Home I See Again":
My child-hood home I see again,
And gladden with the view;
And still as mem'ries crowd my brain,
There's sadness in it too--
O memory! thou mid-way world
'Twixt Earth and Paradise;
Where things decayed, and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise--
And freed from all that's gross or vile,
Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle,
All bathed in liquid light--
His last known poem was written on July19, 1863, after Union forces repelled a Southern invasion. Lincoln wrote it in the voice of General Robert E. Lee:
Gen. Lee’s invasion of the North written by himself—
In eighteen sixty three, with pomp,
and mighty swell,
Me and Jeff’s Confederacy, went
forth to sack Phil-del,
The Yankees they got arter us, and
giv us particular hell,
And we skedaddled back again,
And didn’t sack Phil-del.
Link -via @brainpicker