Negro Poets and Their Poems. Robert Thomas Kerlin
By Thy firm principles abide.
3. George Moses Horton
By some means or other, self-guided, the North Carolina slave, George Moses Horton, learned to read and write. His first book, Poems by a Slave, appeared in 1829, and other books followed until 1865. Like Hammon, and true to his race, Horton is religious, and, like Reason, and again true to his race, he loves freedom. I choose but a few stanzas to illustrate his quality as a poet:
Alas! and am I born for this,
To wear this slavish chain?
Deprived of all created bliss,
Through hardship, toil, and pain?
How long have I in bondage lain,
And languished to be free!
Alas! and must I still complain,
Deprived of liberty?
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Come, Liberty! thou cheerful sound,
Roll through my ravished ears;
Come, let my grief in joys be drowned,
And drive away my fears.
4. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
A female poet of the same period as Horton wrote in the same strain about freedom:
Make me a grave wher’er you will,
In a lowly plain or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth’s humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.
Like Horton, she lived to see her prayer for freedom answered. Of the Emancipation Proclamation she burst forth in joy:
It shall flash through coming ages,
It shall light the distant years;
And eyes now dim with sorrow
Shall be brighter through their tears.
This slave woman was Frances Ellen Watkins, by marriage Harper. Mrs. Harper attained to a greater popularity than any poet of her race prior to Dunbar. As many as ten thousand copies of some of her poems were in circulation in the middle of the last century. Her success was not unmerited. Many singers of no greater merit have enjoyed greater celebrity. She was thoroughly in the fashion of her times, as Phillis Wheatley was in the yet prevalent fashion of Pope, or, perhaps more accurately, Cowper. The models in the middle of the nineteenth century were Mrs. Hemans, Whittier, and Longfellow. It is in their manner she writes. A serene and beautiful Christian spirit tells a moral tale in fluent ballad stanzas, not without poetic phrasing. In all she beholds, in all she experiences, there is a lesson. There is no grief without its consolation. Serene resignation breathes through all her poems—at least through those written after her freedom was achieved. Illustrations of these traits abound. A few stanzas from Go Work in My Vineyard will suffice. After bitter disappointments in attempting to fulfil the command the “lesson” comes thus sweetly expressed:
F. E. W. Harper
My hands were weak, but I reached them out
To feebler ones than mine,
And over the shadows of my life
Stole the light of a peace divine.
Oh, then my task was a sacred thing,
How precious it grew in my eyes!
’Twas mine to gather the bruised grain
For the Lord of Paradise.
And when the reapers shall lay their grain
On the floors of golden light,
I feel that mine with its broken sheaves
Shall be precious in His sight.
Though thorns may often pierce my feet,
And the shadows still abide,
The mists will vanish before His smile,
There will be light at eventide.
How successfully Mrs. Harper could draw a lesson from the common objects or occurrences of the world about us may be illustrated by the following poem:
TRUTH
A rock, for ages, stern and high,
Stood frowning ’gainst the earth and sky,
And never bowed his haughty crest
When angry storms around him prest.
Morn, springing from the arms of night,
Had often bathed his brow with light,
And kissed the shadows from his face
With tender love and gentle grace.
Day, pausing at the gates of rest,
Smiled on him from the distant West,
And from her throne the dark-browed Night
Threw round his path her softest light.
And yet he stood unmoved and proud,
Nor love, nor wrath, his spirit bowed;
He bared his brow to every blast
And scorned the tempest as it passed.
One day a tiny, humble seed—
The keenest eye would hardly heed—
Fell trembling at that stern rock’s base,
And found a lowly hiding-place.
A ray of light, and drop of dew,
Came with a message, kind and true;
They told her of the world so bright,
Its love, its joy, and rosy light,
And lured her from her hiding-place,
To gaze upon earth’s glorious face.
So, peeping timid from the ground,
She clasped the ancient rock around,
And climbing up with childish grace,
She held him with a close embrace;
Her clinging was a thing of dread;
Where’er she touched a fissure spread,
And he who’d breasted many a storm
Stood frowning there, a mangled form.
A Truth, dropped in the silent earth,
May seem a thing of little worth,
Till, spreading round some mighty wrong,
It saps its pillars proud and strong,
And o’er the fallen ruin weaves
The brightest blooms and fairest leaves.
The story of Vashti, who dared heroically to disobey her monarch-husband, is as well told in simple ballad measure as one may find it. I give it entire:
VASHTI
She leaned her head upon her hand
And heard the King’s decree—
“My lords are feasting in my halls;
Bid Vashti come to me.
“I’ve shown the treasures of my house,
My costly jewels rare,
But with the glory of her eyes
No rubies can compare.
“Adorn’d and crown’d I’d have