April Elegy: April 15 - April 12

VOLUME 175

NUMBER 6

JUNE, 1945

88th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

MY MOTHER remembers an April morning eighty years ago — the gray horse galloping up the little hill at Kensington, the driver standing upright in the carriage, the voice shouting: “Oh, Mr. Hillard, President Lincoln is dead! President Lincoln is dead!” She remembers her father leaning the rake against the fence and catching the whitewashed pickets in his hands and weeping. She was not yet nine that year, but she remembers her father’s grief and the April smell of the raked leaves burning and the sound of the galloping horse going on, the voice shouting.

Those who remember that April now are old. They have learned many things about sorrow — a son killed in a strange land in a war that came to nothing: the Germans trampled his grave within a generation. Nevertheless when they think of the roots of sorrow, they think of the April morning in their childhood — of the old man in the lurching carriage shouting “Oh, Mr. Hillard, President Lincoln is dead!”; of the father weeping with his head against his arms and the smell of the wintergathered, burning leaves blown over.

Now there is another April. Now there is new grief and new remembrance. Now it is not to the old that the lilacs speak in the April dooryards: not to the old alone. Each of us has his image of this other April — the messenger’s face in the office door with the frightened eyes behind the spectacles, every feature remembered forever; the terrible, not to be forgotten words; the cold glass of the window; the trees unchanged; the sun unchanged.

We remember the marching troops in the streets beneath the new-leaved trees, the caisson with its folded flag, the music dying out, the silence. We will think of these things for a long time. Those who are children now will remember this.

These arc the unforgettable hours; the mysteries; the moments greater than any who live in them.

These are the moments when the mystery of the people is made evident — when the grief of all gathers the grief of each into something greater; when the people see in truth they are a people.

We did not know we would weep so for him. We did not know we would stand in the spring sun or at evening by the railroad tracks or along the streets where they would bring him. We did not know we would sit in our chairs, at our desks, our hands still. There were many who loved him, but even those who loved him did not know.

The proposition of the people is not a political proposition. It is not the constitution of a form of government. It is a mystery. It is a deep trust and a declaration of truth and a mystery. Once or twice in the centuries of a people it is proved true.

Those in whom it is proved have the surest greatness. Those in whom the people find themselves to be a people are remembered. Those in whom the people’s grief becomes the grieving of a people are remembered always. They have no need of monuments. They are themselves the monuments— but of the people, not themselves. They are the monuments that mark the certainty and reassurance of the people.

The lilacs remember them.

Copyright 19$5, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.