This month marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination. Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address a year and a half earlier at the cemetery dedication in 1863. I think it’s worth taking the time to reread it today. Some may not consider it poetry, but I do.

 

Gettysburg Address

 

Four score and seven years ago

our fathers brought forth on this continent

a new nation, conceived in liberty,

and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war,

testing whether that nation,

or any nation so conceived and so dedicated,

can long endure.

 

We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field

as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives

that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

 

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate –

we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggle here,

have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

 

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here,

but it can never forget what they did here.

 

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here

to the unfinished work which they who fought here

have thus far so nobly advanced.

 

It is rather for us to be here dedicated

to the great task remaining before us –

that from these honored dead we take increased devotion

that we here highly resolve

that these dead shall not have died in vain –

that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom –

and that government of the people, by the people, for the people,

shall not perish from the earth.