Part 1

CAROLING DUSK

_Books by Countee Cullen_

Color Copper Sun The Ballad of the Brown Girl The Medea The Lost Zoo My Lives and How I Lost Them On These I Stand One Way to Heaven

_Edited by Countee Cullen_

Caroling Dusk

CAROLING DUSK

_An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets_

Edited by COUNTEE CULLEN

HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London

CAROLING DUSK. Copyright 1927 by Harper & Brothers. Copyright renewed 1955 by Ida M. Cullen. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N. Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

ISBN: 0-06-010926-2

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 27-23175

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For permission to use the poems in this anthology, the editor wishes to thank the poets represented, and the following magazines and publishers:

Dodd, Mead and Co. for poems from _The Collected Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar_

Boni and Liveright for poems from _Cane_ by Jean Toomer

Alfred A. Knopf for poems from _The Weary Blues_ and _Fine Clothes to the Jew_ by Langston Hughes

The Viking Press for “The Creation” from _God’s Trombones_ by James Weldon Johnson

The Cornhill Publishing Co. for poems from _The Band of Gideon_ by Joseph S. Cotter, and from _Fifty Years and other Poems_ by James Weldon Johnson, and from _The Heart of a Woman_ by Georgia Douglas Johnson

Harcourt, Brace & Co. for poems from _Harlem Shadows_ by Claude McKay and for _A Litany of Atlanta_ by W. E. B. DuBois

Harper & Brothers for poems from _Color_ and _Copper Sun_ by Countee Cullen

B. J. Brimmer Co. for poems from _Bronze_ by Georgia Douglas Johnson

Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life for _Desolate_ and _My House_ by Claude McKay; _Old Black Men_ by Georgia Douglas Johnson; _Summer Matures_, _Fulfillment_, _The Road_ by Helene Johnson; _Portrait_ by George Leonard Allen; _For the Candlelight_ by Angelina Weld Grimké; _The Return_, _Golgotha Is a Mountain_, _The Day Breakers_, and _God Give to Men_ by Arna Bontemps; _I Have a Rendezvous With Life_ by Countee Cullen; _Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas_ and _Hatred_ by Gwendolyn B. Bennett; _Joy_, _Solace_, _Interim_ by Clarissa Scott Delany; _Confession_ by Donald Jeffrey Hayes; _On Seeing Two Brown Boys In a Catholic Church_ and _To a Persistent Phantom_ by Frank Horne; _Poem_ by Blanche Taylor Dickinson; _The New Negro_ by James Edward McCall; _The Tragedy of Pete_ and _The Wayside Well_ by Joseph S. Cotter, Sr.; _No Images_ by Waring Cuney; _Northboun’_ by Lucy Ariel Williams; _Shadow_ by Richard Bruce; _The Resurrection_ by Jonathan H. Brooks; _Africa and Transformation_ by Lewis Alexander

The Conning Tower of the New York World for _Noblesse Oblige_ by Jessie Redmond Fauset

The Crisis for _That Hill_ by Blanche Taylor Dickinson; _Nocturne at Bethesda_ by Arna Bontemps; _Letters Found Near a Suicide_ by Frank Horne; _Morning Light_ by Mary Effie Lee Newsome; _Dunbar_ by Anne Spencer

The Century for _My City_ by James Weldon Johnson

Vanity Fair for _Bottled_ by Helene Johnson

Palms for _A Tree Design_ by Arna Bontemps; _Lines to a Nasturtium_ by Anne Spencer; _Black Madonna_ by Albert Rice; _Words! Words!_ by Jessie Fauset; _Magula_ by Helene Johnson; and _The Mask_ by Clarissa Scott Delany

Fire for _Jungle Taste_ by Edward S. Silvera; _Length of Moon_ by Arna Bontemps; _The Death Bed_ by Waring Cuney

The World Tomorrow for _A Black Man Talks of Reaping_ by Arna Bontemps

The Survey for _Russian Cathedral_ by Claude McKay

The Atlantic Monthly for _Nativity_ and _The Serving Girl_ by Gladys Casley Hayford

The Carolina Magazine for _The Dark Brother_ by Lewis Alexander

FOREWORD

It is now five years since James Weldon Johnson edited with a brilliant essay on “The Negro’s Creative Genius” _The Book of American Negro Poetry_, four years since the publication of Robert T. Kerlin’s _Negro Poets and Their Poems_, and three years since from the Trinity College Press in Durham, North Carolina, came _An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes_, edited by Newman Ivey White and Walter Clinton Jackson. The student of verse by American Negro poets will find in these three anthologies comprehensive treatment of the work of Negro poets from Phyllis Wheatley, the first American Negro known to have composed verses, to writers of the present day. With Mr. Johnson’s scholarly and painstaking survey, from both a historical and a critical standpoint, of the entire range of verse by American Negroes, and with Professor Kerlin’s inclusions of excerpts from the work of most of those Negro poets whose poems were extant at the time of his compilation, there would be scant reason for the assembling and publication of another such collection were it not for the new voices that within the past three to five years have sung so significantly as to make imperative an anthology recording some snatches of their songs. To those intelligently familiar with what is popularly termed the renaissance in art and literature by Negroes, it will not be taken as a sentimentally risky observation to contend that the recent yearly contests conducted by Negro magazines, such as _Opportunity_ and _The Crisis_, as well as a growing tendency on the part of white editors to give impartial consideration to the work of Negro writers, have awakened to a happy articulation many young Negro poets who had thitherto lisped only in isolated places in solitary numbers. It is primarily to give them a concerted hearing that this collection has been published. For most of these poets the publication of individual volumes of their poems is not an immediate issue. However, many of their poems during these four or five years of accentuated interest in the artistic development of the race have become familiar to a large and ever-widening circle of readers who, we feel, will welcome a volume marshaling what would otherwise remain for some time a miscellany of deeply appreciated but scattered verse.

The place of poetry in the cultural development of a race or people has always been one of importance; indeed, poets are prone, with many good reasons for their conceit, to hold their art the most important. Thus while essentially wishing to draw the public ear to the work of the younger Negro poets, there have been included with their poems those of modern Negro poets already established and acknowledged, by virtue of their seniority and published books, as worthy practitioners of their art. There were Negro poets before Paul Laurence Dunbar, but his uniquity as the first Negro to attain to and maintain a distinguished place among American poets, a place fairly merited by the most acceptable standards of criticism, makes him the pivotal poet of this volume.

I have called this collection an anthology of verse by Negro poets rather than an anthology of Negro verse, since this latter designation would be more confusing than accurate. Negro poetry, it seems to me, in the sense that we speak of Russian, French, or Chinese poetry, must emanate from some country other than this in some language other than our own. Moreover, the attempt to corral the outbursts of the ebony muse into some definite mold to which all poetry by Negroes will conform seems altogether futile and aside from the facts. This country’s Negro writers may here and there turn some singular facet toward the literary sun, but in the main, since theirs is also the heritage of the English language, their work will not present any serious aberration from the poetic tendencies of their times. The conservatives, the middlers, and the arch heretics will be found among them as among the white poets; and to say that the pulse beat of their verse shows generally such a fever, or the symptoms of such an ague, will prove on closer examination merely the moment’s exaggeration of a physician anxious to establish a new literary ailment. As heretical as it may sound, there is the probability that Negro poets, dependent as they are on the English language, may have more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance. Some of the poets herein represented will eventually find inclusion in any discriminatingly ordered anthology of American verse, and there will be no reason for giving such selections the needless distinction of a separate section marked Negro verse.

While I do not feel that the work of these writers conforms to anything that can be called the Negro school of poetry, neither do I feel that their work is varied to the point of being sensational; rather is theirs a variety within a uniformity that is trying to maintain the higher traditions of English verse. I trust the selections here presented bear out this contention. The poet writes out of his experience, whether it be personal or vicarious, and as these experiences differ among other poets, so do they differ among Negro poets; for the double obligation of being both Negro and American is not so unified as we are often led to believe. A survey of the work of Negro poets will show that the individual diversifying ego transcends the synthesizing hue. From the roots of varied experiences have flowered the dialect of Dunbar, the recent sermon poems of James Weldon Johnson, and some of Helene Johnson’s more colloquial verses, which, differing essentially only in a few expressions peculiar to Negro slang, are worthy counterparts of verses done by John V. A. Weaver “in American.” Attempt to hedge all these in with a name, and your imagination must deny the facts. Langston Hughes, poetizing the blues in his zeal to represent the Negro masses, and Sterling Brown, combining a similar interest in such poems as “Long Gone” and “The Odyssey of Big Boy” with a capacity for turning a neat sonnet according to the rules, represent differences as unique as those between Burns and Whitman. Jessie Fauset with Cornell University and training at the Sorbonne as her intellectual equipment surely justifies the very subjects and forms of her poems: “Touché,” “La Vie C’est la Vie,” “Noblesse Oblige,” etc.; while Lewis Alexander, with no known degree from the University of Tokyo, is equally within the province of his creative prerogatives in composing Japanese _hokkus_ and _tankas_. Although Anne Spencer lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, and in her biographical note recognizes the Negro as the great American taboo, I have seen but two poems by her which are even remotely concerned with this subject; rather does she write with a cool precision that calls forth comparison with Amy Lowell and the influence of a rock-bound seacoast. And Lula Lowe Weeden, the youngest poet in the volume, living in the same Southern city, is too young to realize that she is colored in an environment calculated to impress her daily with the knowledge of this pigmentary anomaly.

There are lights and shades of difference even in their methods of decrying race injustices, where these peculiar experiences of Negro life cannot be overlooked. Claude McKay is most exercised, rebellious, and vituperative to a degree that clouds his lyricism in many instances, but silhouettes most forcibly his high dudgeon; while neither Arna Bontemps, at all times cool, calm, and intensely religious, nor Georgia Douglas Johnson, in many instances bearing up bravely under comparison with Sara Teasdale, takes advantage of the numerous opportunities offered them for rhymed polemics.

If dialect is missed in this collection, it is enough to state that the day of dialect as far as Negro poets are concerned is in the decline. Added to the fact that these poets are out of contact with this fast-dying medium, certain sociological considerations and the natural limitations of dialect for poetic expression militate against its use even as a _tour de force_. In a day when artificiality is so vigorously condemned, the Negro poet would be foolish indeed to turn to dialect. The majority of present-day poems in dialect are the efforts of white poets.

This anthology, by no means offered as _the_ anthology of verse by Negro poets, is but a prelude, we hope, to that fuller symphony which Negro poets will in time contribute to the national literature, and we shall be sadly disappointed if the next few years do not find this collection entirely outmoded.

* * * * *

The biographical notices carried with these poems have been written by the poets themselves save in three cases (Dunbar’s having been written by his wife, the younger Cotter’s by his father, and Lula Weeden’s by her mother), and if they do not reveal to a curious public all it might wish to know about the poets, they at least reveal all that the poets deem necessary and discreet for the public to know.

COUNTEE CULLEN.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD vii

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes 2 Death Song 4 Life 5 After the Quarrel 5 Ships that Pass in the Night 7 We Wear the Mask 8 Sympathy 8 The Debt 9

JOSEPH S. COTTER, SR. The Tragedy of Pete 11 The Way-side Well 15

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON From the German of Uhland 17 The Glory of the Day Was in Her Face 18 The Creation 19 The White Witch 22 My City 25

WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT DU BOIS A Litany of Atlanta 26

WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE Scintilla 31 Rye Bread 31 October XXIX, 1795 32 Del Cascar 33

JAMES EDWARD MCCALL The New Negro 34

ANGELINA WELD GRIMKÉ Hushed by the Hands of Sleep 36 Greenness 36 The Eyes of My Regret 37 Grass Fingers 38 Surrender 38 The Ways o’ Men 39 Tenebris 40 When the Green Lies Over the Earth 41 A Mona Lisa 42 Paradox 43 Your Hands 44 I Weep 45 For the Candle Light 45 Dusk 46 The Puppet Player 46 A Winter Twilight 46

ANNE SPENCER Neighbors 47 I Have a Friend 47 Substitution 48 Questing 48 Life-long, Poor Browning 49 Dunbar 50 Innocence 51 Creed 51 Lines to a Nasturtium 52 At the Carnival 53

MARY EFFIE LEE NEWSOME Morning Light 55 Pansy 56 Sassafras Tea 56 Sky Pictures 57 The Quilt 58 The Baker’s Boy 58 Wild Roses 59 Quoits 59

JOHN FREDERICK MATHEUS Requiem 61

FENTON JOHNSON When I Die 62 Puck Goes to Court 63 The Marathon Runner 64

JESSIE FAUSET Words! Words! 65 Touché 66 Noblesse Oblige 67 La Vie C’est la Vie 69 The Return 70 Rencontre 70 Fragment 70

ALICE DUNBAR NELSON Snow in October 71 Sonnet 72 I Sit and Sew 73

GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON Service 75 Hope 75 The Suppliant 76 Little Son 76 Old Black Men 77 Lethe 77 Proving 77 I Want to Die While You Love Me 78 Recessional 79 My Little Dreams 79 What Need Have I for Memory? 80 When I Am Dead 80 The Dreams of the Dreamer 80 The Heart of a Woman 81

CLAUDE MCKAY America 83 Exhortation: Summer, 1919 84 Flame-heart 85 The Wild Goat 87 Russian Cathedral 87 Desolate 88 Absence 91 My House 92

JEAN TOOMER Reapers 94 Evening Song 94 Georgia Dusk 95 Song of the Son 96 Cotton Song 97 Face 98 November Cotton Flower 99

JOSEPH S. COTTER, JR. Rain Music 100 Supplication 101 An April Day 102 The Deserter 102 And What Shall You Say? 103 The Band of Gideon 103

BLANCHE TAYLOR DICKINSON The Walls of Jericho 106 Poem 107 Revelation 107 That Hill 109 To an Icicle 110 Four Walls 110

FRANK HORNE On Seeing Two Brown Boys in a Catholic Church 112 To a Persistent Phantom 113 Letters Found Near a Suicide 114 Nigger 120

LEWIS ALEXANDER Negro Woman 122 Africa 123 Transformation 124 The Dark Brother 124 Tanka I-VIII 125 Japanese Hokku 127 Day and Night 129

STERLING A. BROWN Odyssey of Big Boy 130 Maumee Ruth 133 Long Gone 134 To a Certain Lady, in Her Garden 136 Salutamus 138 Challenge 138 Return 139

CLARISSA SCOTT DELANY Joy 140 Solace 141 Interim 142 The Mask 143

LANGSTON HUGHES I, Too 145 Prayer 146 Song for a Dark Girl 147 Homesick Blues 147 Fantasy in Purple 148 Dream Variation 149 The Negro Speaks of Rivers 149 Poem 150 Suicide’s Note 151 Mother to Son 151 A House in Taos 152

GWENDOLYN B. BENNETT Quatrains 155 Secret 155 Advice 156 To a Dark Girl 157 Your Songs 157 Fantasy 158 Lines Written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas 159 Hatred 160 Sonnet--1 160 Sonnet--2 161

ARNA BONTEMPS The Return 163 A Black Man Talks of Reaping 165 To a Young Girl Leaving the Hill Country 165 Nocturne at Bethesda 166 Length of Moon 168 Lancelot 169 Gethsemane 169 A Tree Design 170 Blight 170 The Day-breakers 171 Close Your Eyes! 171 God Give to Men 172 Homing 172 Golgotha Is a Mountain 173

ALBERT RICE The Black Madonna 177

COUNTEE CULLEN Lines to Our Elders 179 I Have a Rendezvous with Life 180 Protest 181 Yet Do I Marvel 182 To Lovers of Earth: Fair Warning 182 From the Dark Tower 183 To John Keats, Poet, at Springtime 184 Four Epitaphs 186 Incident 187

DONALD JEFFREY HAYES Inscription 188 Auf Wiedersehen 189 Night 189 Confession 190 Nocturne 190 After All 191

JONATHAN HENDERSON BROOKS The Resurrection 193 The Last Quarter Moon of the Dying Year 195 Paean 195

GLADYS MAY CASELY HAYFORD Nativity 197 Rainy Season Love Song 198 The Serving Girl 200 Baby Cobina 200

LUCY ARIEL WILLIAMS Northboun’ 201

GEORGE LEONARD ALLEN To Melody 204 Portrait 204

RICHARD BRUCE Shadow 206 Cavalier 207

WARING CUNEY The Death Bed 208 A Triviality 209 I Think I See Him There 210 Dust 210 No Images 212 The Radical 212 True Love 213

EDWARD S. SILVERA South Street 214 Jungle Taste 214

HELENE JOHNSON What Do I Care for Morning 216 Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem 217 Summer Matures 217 Poem 218 Fulfillment 219 The Road 221 Bottled 221 Magalu 223

WESLEY CURTWRIGHT The Close of Day 225

LULA LOWE WEEDEN Me Alone 227 Have You Seen It 228 Robin Red Breast 228 The Stream 228 The Little Dandelion 229 Dance 229

INDEX 230

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

Paul Laurence Dunbar. Born, Dayton, Ohio, June 27, 1872. Educated in public schools, and graduated from Dayton High School, where he achieved some distinction. Editor of school paper, and noted as a versifier, from his grammar-school days. Printed his first book, _Oak and Ivy_, in 1893.

Two friends of his early manhood helped most to shape his career, and to encourage him in his days of struggle--Dr. H. A. Tobey, the celebrated alienist of Toledo, Ohio, and Frederick Douglass. The former helped him to bring his second book, _Majors and Minors_, before the public; the latter, with whom he was associated in the Negro Building at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, was the hero of the poet’s dreams, the one to whom he dedicated two of his most serious poems.

Although Dunbar is remembered largely for his dialect verse, it was never his intention to concentrate on dialect. His poems in pure English constitute the greater bulk of his verse, and that to which he was most passionately devoted. The tragedy of his life was that the world “turned to praise the jingle in a broken tongue.” His friendship for Booker Washington and a visit to Tuskegee inspired him to write the Tuskegee School Song, which is sung to the tune of “Fair Harvard.”

The famous criticism of _Majors and Minors_ by William Dean Howells in _Harper’s Weekly_, June 27, 1897 established Dunbar’s prestige as an important figure in American literature. From that time his success was assured.

He was married to Alice Ruth Moore of New Orleans, a teacher in Brooklyn, N. Y., in March, 1898.

He was as indefatigable a writer of prose as of poetry; short stories, novels, criticism, essays and some short plays poured from his pen. His published works, exclusive of the two volumes of verse mentioned above, are: _Lyrics of Lowly Life_, _Lyrics of the Hearthside_, _Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow_; several smaller volumes, illustrated editions of poems in the preceding volumes; short stories, _Folks from Dixie_, _The Strength of Gideon_; novels, _The Uncalled_, _The Fanatics_, _The Love of Landry_, _The Sport of the Gods_.

He died in Dayton, Ohio, February 9, 1906.

_Alice Dunbar Nelson._

ERE SLEEP COMES DOWN TO SOOTHE THE WEARY EYES[1]

Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes, Which all the day with ceaseless care have sought The magic gold which from the seeker flies; Ere dreams put on the gown and cap of thought, And make the waking world a world of lies,-- Of lies most palpable, uncouth, forlorn, That say life’s full of aches and tears and sighs,-- Oh, how with more than dreams the soul is torn, Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes.

Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes, How all the griefs and heartaches we have known Come up like pois’nous vapors that arise From some base witch’s caldron, when the crone, To work some potent spell, her magic plies. The past which held its share of bitter pain, Whose ghost we prayed that Time might exorcise, Comes up, is lived and suffered o’er again, Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes.

Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes, What phantoms fill the dimly lighted room; What ghostly shades in awe-creating guise Are bodied forth within the teeming gloom. What echoes faint of sad and soul-sick cries, And pangs of vague inexplicable pain That pay the spirit’s ceaseless enterprise, Come thronging through the chambers of the brain, Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes.

Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes, Where ranges forth the spirit far and free? Through what strange realms and unfamiliar skies Tends her far course to lands of mystery? To lands unspeakable--beyond surmise, Where shapes unknowable to being spring, Till, faint of wing, the Fancy fails and dies Much wearied with the spirit’s journeying, Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes.

Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes, How questioneth the soul that other soul,-- The inner sense which neither cheats nor lies, But self exposes unto self, a scroll Full writ with all life’s acts unwise or wise, In characters indelible and known; So, trembling with the shock of sad surprise, The soul doth view its awful self alone, Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes.

When sleep comes down to seal the weary eyes, The last dear sleep whose soft embrace is balm, And whom sad sorrow teaches us to prize For kissing all our passions into calm, Ah, then, no more we heed the sad world’s cries, Or seek to probe th’ eternal mystery, Or fret our souls at long-withheld replies, At glooms through which our visions cannot see, When sleep comes down to seal the weary eyes.

DEATH SONG[2]

Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass, Whah de branch’ll go a-singin’ as it pass. An’ w’en I’s a-layin’ low, I kin hyeah it as it go Singin’, “Sleep, my honey, tek yo’ res’ at las’.”

Lay me nigh to whah hit meks a little pool, An’ de watah stan’s so quiet lak an’ cool, Whah de little birds in spring, Ust to come an’ drink an’ sing, An’ de chillen waded on dey way to school.

Let me settle w’en my shouldahs draps dey load Nigh enough to hyeah de noises in de road; Fu’ I t’ink de las’ long res’ Gwine to soothe my sperrit bes’ If I’s layin’ ’mong de t’ings I’s allus knowed.

LIFE[3]