The Book of American Negro Poetry Part 2

In the poem addressed to the Earl of Dartmouth, she speaks of freedom and makes a reference to the parents from whom she was taken as a child, a reference which cannot but strike the reader as rather unimpa.s.sioned:

"Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, Whence flow these wishes for the common good, By feeling hearts alone best understood; I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was s.n.a.t.c.h'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat; What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labor in my parents' breast?

Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd; Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway?"

The bulk of Phillis Wheatley's work consists of poems addressed to people of prominence. Her book was dedicated to the Countess of Huntington, at whose house she spent the greater part of her time while in England. On his repeal of the Stamp Act, she wrote a poem to King George III, whom she saw later; another poem she wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth, whom she knew.

A number of her verses were addressed to other persons of distinction.

Indeed, it is apparent that Phillis was far from being a democrat. She was far from being a democrat not only in her social ideas but also in her political ideas; unless a religious meaning is given to the closing lines of her ode to General Washington, she was a decided royalist:

"A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine With gold unfading, Washington! be thine."

Nevertheless, she was an ardent patriot. Her ode to General Washington (1775), her spirited poem, "On Major General Lee" (1776) and her poem, "Liberty and Peace," written in celebration of the close of the war, reveal not only strong patriotic feeling but an understanding of the issues at stake. In her poem, "On Major General Lee," she makes her hero reply thus to the taunts of the British commander into whose hands he has been delivered through treachery:

"O arrogance of tongue!

And wild ambition, ever p.r.o.ne to wrong!

Believ'st thou, chief, that armies such as thine Can stretch in dust that heaven-defended line?

In vain allies may swarm from distant lands, And demons aid in formidable bands, Great as thou art, thou shun'st the field of fame, Disgrace to Britain and the British name!

When offer'd combat by the n.o.ble foe, (Foe to misrule) why did the sword forego The easy conquest of the rebel-land?

Perhaps TOO easy for thy martial hand.

What various causes to the field invite!

For plunder YOU, and we for freedom fight, Her cause divine with generous ardor fires, And every bosom glows as she inspires!

Already thousands of your troops have fled To the drear mansions of the silent dead: Columbia, too, beholds with streaming eyes Her heroes fall--'tis freedom's sacrifice!

So wills the power who with convulsive storms Shakes impious realms, and nature's face deforms; Yet those brave troops, innum'rous as the sands, One soul inspires, one General Chief commands; Find in your train of boasted heroes, one To match the praise of G.o.dlike Washington.

Thrice happy Chief in whom the virtues join, And heaven taught prudence speaks the man divine."

What Phillis Wheatley failed to achieve is due in no small degree to her education and environment. Her mind was steeped in the cla.s.sics; her verses are filled with cla.s.sical and mythological allusions. She knew Ovid thoroughly and was familiar with other Latin authors. She must have known Alexander Pope by heart. And, too, she was reared and sheltered in a wealthy and cultured family,--a wealthy and cultured Boston family; she never had the opportunity to learn life; she never found out her own true relation to life and to her surroundings. And it should not be forgotten that she was only about thirty years old when she died. The impulsion or the compulsion that might have driven her genius off the worn paths, out on a journey of exploration, Phillis Wheatley never received. But, whatever her limitations, she merits more than America has accorded her.

Horton, who was born three years after Phillis Wheatley's death, expressed in all of his poetry strong complaint at his condition of slavery and a deep longing for freedom. The following verses are typical of his style and his ability:

"Alas! and am I born for this, To wear this slavish chain?

Deprived of all created bliss, Through hardship, toil, and pain?

Come, Liberty! thou cheerful sound, Roll through my ravished ears; Come, let my grief in joys be drowned, And drive away my fears."

In Mrs. Harper we find something more than the complaint and the longing of Horton. We find an expression of a sense of wrong and injustice. The following stanzas are from a poem addressed to the white women of America:

"You can sigh o'er the sad-eyed Armenian Who weeps in her desolate home.

You can mourn o'er the exile of Russia From kindred and friends doomed to roam.

But hark! from our Southland are floating Sobs of anguish, murmurs of pain, And women heart-stricken are weeping O'er their tortured and slain.

Have ye not, oh, my favored sisters, Just a plea, a prayer or a tear For mothers who dwell 'neath the shadows Of agony, hatred and fear?

Weep not, oh my well sheltered sisters, Weep not for the Negro alone, But weep for your sons who must gather The crops which their fathers have sown."

Whitman, in the midst of "The Rape of Florida," a poem in which he related the taking of the State of Florida from the Seminoles, stops and discusses the race question. He discusses it in many other poems; and he discusses it from many different angles. In Whitman we find not only an expression of a sense of wrong and injustice, but we hear a note of faith and a note also of defiance. For example, in the opening to Canto II of "The Rape of Florida":

"Greatness by nature cannot be entailed; It is an office ending with the man,-- Sage, hero, Saviour, tho' the Sire be hailed, The son may reach obscurity in the van: Sublime achievements know no patent plan, Man's immortality's a book with seals, And none but G.o.d shall open--none else can-- But opened, it the mystery reveals,-- Manhood's conquest of man to heaven's respect appeals.

"Is manhood less because man's face is black?

Let thunders of the loosened seals reply!

Who shall the rider's restive steed turn back, Or who withstand the arrows he lets fly Between the mountains of eternity?

Genius ride forth! Thou gift and torch of heav'n!

The mastery is kindled in thine eye; To conquest ride! thy bow of strength is giv'n-- The trampled hordes of caste before thee shall be driv'n!

"'Tis hard to judge if hatred of one's race, By those who deem themselves superior-born, Be worse than that quiescence in disgrace, Which only merits--and should only--scorn.

Oh, let me see the Negro night and morn, Pressing and fighting in, for place and power!

All earth is place--all time th' auspicious hour, While heaven leans forth to look, oh, will he quail or cower?

"Ah! I abhor his protest and complaint!

His pious looks and patience I despise!

He can't evade the test, disguised as saint; The manly voice of freedom bids him rise, And shake himself before Philistine eyes!

And, like a lion roused, no sooner than A foe dare come, play all his energies, And court the fray with fury if he can; For h.e.l.l itself respects a fearless, manly man."

It may be said that none of these poets strike a deep native strain or sound a distinctively original note, either in matter or form. That is true; but the same thing may be said of all the American poets down to the writers of the present generation, with the exception of Poe and Walt Whitman. The thing in which these black poets are mostly excelled by their contemporaries is mere technique.

Paul Laurence Dunbar stands out as the first poet from the Negro race in the United States to show a combined mastery over poetic material and poetic technique, to reveal innate literary distinction in what he wrote, and to maintain a high level of performance. He was the first to rise to a height from which he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was the first to see objectively its humor, its superst.i.tions, its shortcomings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds, its yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary form.

Dunbar's fame rests chiefly on his poems in Negro dialect. This appraisal of him is, no doubt, fair; for in these dialect poems he not only carried his art to the highest point of perfection, but he made a contribution to American literature unlike what any one else had made, a contribution which, perhaps, no one else could have made. Of course, Negro dialect poetry was written before Dunbar wrote, most of it by white writers; but the fact stands out that Dunbar was the first to use it as a medium for the true interpretation of Negro character and psychology. And, yet, dialect poetry does not const.i.tute the whole or even the bulk of Dunbar's work. In addition to a large number of poems of a very high order done in literary English, he was the author of four novels and several volumes of short stories.

Indeed, Dunbar did not begin his career as a writer of dialect. I may be pardoned for introducing here a bit of reminiscence. My personal friendship with Paul Dunbar began before he had achieved recognition, and continued to be close until his death. When I first met him he had published a thin volume, "Oak and Ivy," which was being sold chiefly through his own efforts. "Oak and Ivy" showed no distinctive Negro influence, but rather the influence of James Whitcomb Riley. At this time Paul and I were together every day for several months. He talked to me a great deal about his hopes and ambitions. In these talks he revealed that he had reached a realization of the possibilities of poetry in the dialect, together with a recognition of the fact that it offered the surest way by which he could get a hearing. Often he said to me: "I've got to write dialect poetry; it's the only way I can get them to listen to me." I was with Dunbar at the beginning of what proved to be his last illness. He said to me then: "I have not grown. I am writing the same things I wrote ten years ago, and am writing them no better." His self-accusation was not fully true; he had grown, and he had gained a surer control of his art, but he had not accomplished the greater things of which he was constantly dreaming; the public had held him to the things for which it had accorded him recognition. If Dunbar had lived he would have achieved some of those dreams, but even while he talked so dejectedly to me he seemed to feel that he was not to live. He died when he was only thirty-three.

It has a bearing on this entire subject to note that Dunbar was of unmixed Negro blood; so, as the greatest figure in literature which the colored race in the United States has produced, he stands as an example at once refuting and confounding those who wish to believe that whatever extraordinary ability an Aframerican shows is due to an admixture of white blood.

As a man, Dunbar was kind and tender. In conversation he was brilliant and polished. His voice was his chief charm, and was a great element in his success as a reader of his own works. In his actions he was impulsive as a child, sometimes even erratic; indeed, his intimate friends almost looked upon him as a spoiled boy. He was always delicate in health.

Temperamentally, he belonged to that cla.s.s of poets who Taine says are vessels too weak to contain the spirit of poetry, the poets whom poetry kills, the Byrons, the Burns's, the De Mussets, the Poes.

To whom may he be compared, this boy who scribbled his early verses while he ran an elevator, whose youth was a battle against poverty, and who, in spite of almost insurmountable obstacles, rose to success? A comparison between him and Burns is not unfitting. The similarity between many phases of their lives is remarkable, and their works are not incommensurable.

Burns took the strong dialect of his people and made it cla.s.sic; Dunbar took the humble speech of his people and in it wrought music.

Mention of Dunbar brings up for consideration the fact that, although he is the most outstanding figure in literature among the Aframericans of the United States, he does not stand alone among the Aframericans of the whole Western world. There are Placido and Manzano in Cuba; Vieux and Durand in Haiti, Machado de a.s.sis in Brazil; Leon Laviaux in Martinique, and others still that might be mentioned, who stand on a plane with or even above Dunbar. Placido and Machado de a.s.sis rank as great in the literatures of their respective countries without any qualifications whatever. They are world figures in the literature of the Latin languages. Machado de a.s.sis is somewhat handicapped in this respect by having as his tongue and medium the lesser known Portuguese, but Placido, writing in the language of Spain, Mexico, Cuba and of almost the whole of South America, is universally known. His works have been republished in the original in Spain, Mexico and in most of the Latin-American countries; several editions have been published in the United States; translations of his works have been made into French and German.

Placido is in some respects the greatest of all the Cuban poets. In sheer genius and the fire of inspiration he surpa.s.ses even the more finished Heredia. Then, too, his birth, his life and his death ideally contained the tragic elements that go into the making of a halo about a poet's head.

Placido was born in Habana in 1809. The first months of his life were pa.s.sed in a foundling asylum; indeed, his real name, Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes, was in honor of its founder. His father took him out of the asylum, but shortly afterwards went to Mexico and died there. His early life was a struggle against poverty; his youth and manhood was a struggle for Cuban independence. His death placed him in the list of Cuban martyrs. On the 27th of June, 1844, he was lined up against a wall with ten others and shot by order of the Spanish authorities on a charge of conspiracy. In his short but eventful life he turned out work which bulks more than six hundred pages. During the few hours preceding his execution he wrote three of his best known poems, among them his famous sonnet, "Mother, Farewell!"

Placido's sonnet to his mother has been translated into every important language; William Cullen Bryant did it in English; but in spite of its wide popularity, it is, perhaps, outside of Cuba the least understood of all Placido's poems. It is curious to note how Bryant's translation totally misses the intimate sense of the delicate subtility of the poem.

The American poet makes it a tender and loving farewell of a son who is about to die to a heart-broken mother; but that is not the kind of a farewell that Placido intended to write or did write.