Negro Poets and Their Poems. Robert Thomas Kerlin
to all sorts and conditions—an immortal book. As a life-long teacher and student of poetry, I venture, with no fear, the assertion that from no book of verse in our language can the whole art of poetry be so effectively learned as from Mother Goose’s Melodies. Every device of rhyme, and melody, and rhythm, and tonal color is exemplified here in a manner to produce the effects which all the great artists in verse aim at. This book that we all love—and patronize—is the greatest melodic triumph in the white man’s literature.
Of like merit and certainly no less are the folk rhymes and songs, both the Spirituals and the Seculars, of the Negro. Their art potentialities are immense. Well may the aspirant to fame in poetry put these songs in his memory and peruse them as Burns did the old popular songs of Scotland, to make them yield suggestions of songs at the highest reach of art.
II. The Poetry of Art
But another heritage of song, not so crude nor yet so precious as the Spirituals and the Folk Rhymes has the Negro of to-day. That heritage comes from enslaved and emancipated men and women who by some means or another learned to write and publish their compositions. Although the intrinsic value of this heritage of song cannot be rated high, yet, considering the circumstances of its production, the colored people of America may well take pride in it. Its incidental value can hardly be overestimated. In it is the most infallible record we have of the Negro’s inner life in bondage and in the years following emancipation. Never broken was the tradition from Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley, in the last half of the eighteenth century, to Paul Laurence Dunbar and Joseph Seamon Cotter, in the end of the nineteenth, but constantly enriched by an increasing number of men and women who sought in the form of verse a record of their sufferings and yearnings, consolations and hopes.
1. Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley
Jupiter Hammon was the first American Negro poet of whom any record exists. His first extant poem, “An Evening Thought,” bears the date of 1760, preceding therefore any poem by Phillis Wheatley, his contemporary, by nine years. Following the title of the poem this information is given: “Composed by Jupiter Hammon, a Negro belonging to Mr. Lloyd, of Queen’s Village, on Long Island, the 25th of December, 1760.” With this poem of eighty-eight rhyming lines, printed on a double-column broadside, entered the American Negro into American literature. For that reason alone, were his stanzas inferior to what they are, I should include some of them in this anthology. But the truth is that, as “religious” poetry goes, or went in the eighteenth century—and Hammon’s poetry is all religious—this Negro slave may hold up his head in almost any company.
Nevertheless, the reader must not expect poetry in the typical stanzas I shall quote, but just some remarkable rhyming for an African slave, untaught and without precedent. “An Evening Thought” runs in such stanzas as the following:
Dear Jesus give thy Spirit now,
Thy Grace to every Nation,
That han’t the Lord to whom we bow,
The Author of Salvation.
From “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley, Ethiopian Poetess,” I take the following as a representative stanza:
While thousands muse with earthly toys,
And range about the street,
Dear Phillis, seek for heaven’s joys,
Where we do hope to meet.
“A Poem for Children, with Thoughts on Death,” contains such stanzas as this:
’Tis God alone can make you wise,
His wisdom’s from above,
He fills the soul with sweet supplies
By his redeeming love.
Two stanzas from “A Dialogue, Entitled, The Kind Master and the Dutiful Servant,” will show how that poem runs:
MASTER
Then will the happy day appear,
That virtue shall increase;
Lay up the sword and drop the spear,
And Nations seek for peace.
SERVANT
Then shall we see the happy end,
Tho’ still in some distress;
That distant foes shall act like friends,
And leave their wickedness.
Jupiter Hammon’s birth and death dates are uncommemorated because unknown. Unknown, too, is his grave. But to his memory, no less than to that of Crispus Attucks, there should somewhere be erected a monument.
Phillis Wheatley
Since Stedman included in his Library of American Literature a picture of Phillis Wheatley and specimens of her verse, a few white persons, less than scholars and more than general readers, knew, when Dunbar appeared, that there had been at least one poetic predecessor in his race. But the long stretch between the slave-girl rhymer of Boston and the elevator-boy singer of Dayton was desert. They knew not of George Moses Horton of North Carolina, who found publication for Poems by a Slave in 1829, and Poetical Works in 1845. Horton, who learned to write by his own efforts, is said to have been so fond of poetry that he would pick up any chance scraps of paper he saw, hoping to find verses. They knew not of Ann Plato, of Hartford, Connecticut, a slave girl who published a book of twenty poems in 1841; nor of Frances Ellen Watkins (afterwards Harper) whose Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects appeared in 1857, reaching a circulation of ten thousand copies; nor of Charles L. Reason, whose poem entitled Freedom, published in 1847, voiced the cry of millions of fellow blacks in bonds.
2. Charles L. Reason
Charles L. Reason
Thus bursts forth Reason’s poetic cry, not unlike that of the crude Spirituals:
O Freedom! Freedom! Oh, how oft
Thy loving children call on Thee!
In wailings loud and breathings soft,
Beseeching God, Thy face to see.
With agonizing hearts we kneel,
While ’round us howls the oppressor’s cry—
And suppliant pray that we may feel
The ennobling glances of Thine eye.
The apostrophe continues through forty-two stanzas, commemorating, with appreciative knowledge of history, the countries, battle fields, and heroes associated with the advance of freedom. After an arraignment of civil rulers and a recreant priesthood, the learned and noble apostrophe thus concludes:
Oh, purify each holy court!
The ministry of law and light!
That man no longer may be bought
To trample down his brother’s right.
We lift imploring hands to Thee!
We cry for those in prison bound!
Oh, in Thy strength come! Liberty!
And ’stablish right the wide world round.
We pray to see Thee, face to face:
To feel our souls grow strong and wide:
So ever shall