Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

"I knew only the people I had grown

up with, and they weren't people whose shoes
were always shined, who had been to
Harvard, or who had heard Bach." - LH

Hughes was the first African American author to support himself through his writing; he
produced more than sixty books. He earned critical attention for his portrayal of realistic black
characters and he became one of the dominant voices speaking out on issues concerning black
culture. He wrote in many genres; starting and continuing with poetry, he turned to fiction,
autobiographies, and children's books. His most famous fictional character is Jesse B. Semple,
nicknamed Simple, who uses humor to protest and satirize the existing injustices.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed -

I, too, am America.

- Langston Hughes, 1925

"Harlem"

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore -
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over -
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

- Langston Hughes, 1951

Langston Hughes (1902-1967): A Brief Biography

A Student Project by Pamela Harrelson

James Langston Hughes, or Langston Hughes as we know him, was born on February 1st, 1902
to Carrie Langston Hughes and James Nathaniel Hughes in Joplin, Missouri (Dickinson 6). He
was an only child raised by his grandmother and a family close to his grandmother in Lawrence,
Kansas, Langston rarely saw his mother and father due to their struggle to get along with each
other. He had a rather lonesome upbringing because his grandmother wouldn’t allow him to
play outside with the other children after school. Instead, he was only able to read and do his
school work (Hill 15). When Langston was thirteen he moved to Lincoln, Illinois with his
mother and her new husband. It was there in Lincoln that Langston wrote his first poem and was
declared class poet of his school (Dickinson 9).

In Lincoln, Hughes attended Central High School and was greatly admired by his fellow
classmates. A few of his poems were published in his high school magazine, The Belfry Owl,
and others were sent off to magazines in New York. Unfortunately, most of the magazines sent
rejection slips back to him with the exception of one from the editor of The Liberator (Dickinson
9). In early 1921, a magazine sponsored by the NAACP entitled The Brownie’s Book offered
Hughes his first publishing opportunity. Two of Hughes’ poems, “Winter Sweetness” and
“Fairies”, along with a prose description of the Mexican games appeared in the magazine
(Dickinson 12). Six months later, Hughes placed his well known poem “The Negro Speaks of
Rivers” in the NAACP’s official journal, The Crisis. This would only be the beginning of
Hughes’ frequent and almost exclusive publications in The Crisis. It was at this time that Du
Bois himself became familiar with and impressed by Hughes’ work (Dickinson 13).

Langston Hughes was focused on becoming a writer and poet from the early years of his
life. Despite the racial opposition and laws of segregation he faced in his life, Hughes was not
stopped by these constantly suppressing forces. James Hughes, Langston Hughes’ distant and
demanding father, expected more of his son that most fathers. He wanted Langston to excel in
whatever profession he chose, but he also expected Langston to be treated fairly by all. His
father was also disappointed to find out his son’s work was not paid for by the magazine (Hill
33).
 Hughes was determined to keep up his writing despite the lack of recognition from his
father. He wanted to attend Columbia University, but didn’t have the money to do so. He asked
his father to pay his tuition upon his acceptance and he agreed to pay one year. Hughes was
accepted and attended Columbia in August of 1921. Much to his sadness, he was accepted well
by other students there because of his race (Hill 33). It was the same unsettling reception by the
students of Columbia that drove Hughes to find out about Harlem and the parts of life it had to
offer for him.

Hughes made the most of his time in New York by enjoying the color and diversity he
wasn’t able to find anywhere outside of Harlem. He would visit the Harlem branch of the Public
Library there, along with attending Broadway shows and socializing with the African American
Intellectuals and artists who were drawn to Harlem as well (Hill 35). In 1922, Langston Hughes
left college for a short time to work various medial jobs, and later experienced a major turning
point in his life when he became a sailor. It was during this time that Hughes vowed to renounce
the fantasy worlds most literature and books had to offer. He dumped all of his books into the
ocean and only kept one, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (Hill 38). Through his travels as a
sailor, Hughes visited Africa and various parts of Europe. He did not return to the U.S. until
November of 1924 (Hill 43).

Upon his return he was welcomed will great love and appreciation by the magazines and
movement taking place in Harlem. Hughes had published quite a large amount of poetry,
literature, and plays before leaving the country. He was unaware of how much of his works were
influential and important to so many. It was at this time in Langston Hughes’ life that his works
received numerous awards and recognition (Dickinson 20). In 1926 Langston Hughes enrolled
in Lincoln University and later graduated in 1929 (Hill 50).

Langston Hughes’ work is known for its, “&colorful verses on a wide variety of topics&”(Hill
31). His works are heavily infused with the typical aspects of African American life and come
alive on the page by his implementation of musical and blues rhythms. According to James
Trotman, these accounts of rhythm can be specifically accounted for in two of his primary
works.

As readers we are drawn with him into symbolic, ancestral reflections in “The Negro Speaks
of Rivers” (1921) and into autobiographical accounts of these travels recorded later in The Big
Sea. Sounds, particularly the musical quality of words, pulled him into the cultural repository of
African American music where he used the blues for lyric poetry (Trotman 4).

Hughes refused to create fantasy stories about life. He wrote what he knew about and felt that
was the way he had the most impact on his readers. After many tributes and praise given to
Hughes after his death in 1967, various critics began to ask questions regarding Hughes and his
literary career (Barksdale 132). These critics are debating the quality of Hughes’ writing, and if
by chance he attained his popularity simply because of the era he wrote in. Additionally, they
question his focus on Harlem and wonder if his best works were only before the 1930’s
(Barksdale 132)? It seems as thought these questions and many more being asked now that
Langston Hughes is gone can only recieve speculated answers.

Today, Hughes still maintains a presence in literary studies, history and core curriculum in the
educational system. This presence itself, along with the impressive movement his work creates
in each reader can attest to his true value and exceptional talent as a writer and poet.
Furthermore, from the time of his literary arrival to the present, Langston Hughes has remained a
key figure in the literature that is valued and recognized by most scholarly institutions today. It
appears Hughes was aware and conscientious of his goal to make his life experiences and those
experiences of other African Americans apparent in his literature and poetry. He took a realist’s
perspective towards expressing himself, like many of the other African American writers in his
time and his talents were recognized and supported by the most renowned authors of the Harlem
Renaissance period (Dickinson 15).

To further prove the literary talent that is sometimes questioned by critics, Langston Hughes has
received various awards and recognitions for his contributions to African American and
Contemporary Literature. One of the most prestigious awards Hughes received was the
NAACP’s Springarn Medal (Hill 114). He also won first prize for his poetry in an Opportunity
magazine contest. Hughes’ book Simple Speaks His Mind was his first best seller and his play
Mulatto was the longest running Broadway play by an African American author (Hill 116).
Fiction:
The Ways of White Folks, 1934; Simple Speaks His Mind, 1950; Laughing to Keep from
Crying, 1952; Simple Takes a Wife, 1953; Simple Takes a Claim, 1957; The Best of Simple,
1961; Simple's Uncle Sam, 1965; The Simple Omnibus, 1978; Not Without Laughter, 1979;
Laughing to Keep from Crying and 25 Jesse Simple Stories, 1981; The Best of Simple, 1988;
Popo and Fifina, 1993; The Return of Simple, 1994; Short Stories, 1996.

Nonfiction:
Proletarian Literature in the United States, 1935; A New Song, 1938; The Sweet Flypaper of
Life, 1955; Tambourines to Glory, 1958; The First Book of Africa, 1960; Fight for Freedom,
1962; Something in Common and Other Stories, 1963; A Pictorial History of Blackamericans,
1983; African American History: Four Centuries of Black Life, 1990; Black Magic: The
Pictorial History of the African-American in the Performing Arts, 1990; Thank You, M'am,
1991; A Pictorial History of Black Americans, 1995.

Poetry:
The Weary Blues, 1926; Fine Cloths to the Jew, 1927; Four Negro Poets, 1927; Anthology of
Magazine Verse for 1928: And Yearbook for American Poetry, 1928; Scottsborro Limited: Four
Poems and a Play in Verse, 1932; Shakespear in Harlem, 1942; Freedom's Plow, 1943; Fields of
Wonder, 1947; One-Way Ticket(1948), Montage of a Dream Deferred(1951), Selected Poems of
Langston Hughes(1959), Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, 1961; Black Misery, 1969; The
Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1969; Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1974;
The Panther and the Lash, 1992; Black Misery, 1994; The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,
1994; The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1995; The Pasteboard Bandit, 1997.

Opera and Drama:

The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, 1931; Mule-Bone (with Zora Neale
Hurston), 1932; Mulatto, 1935; Little Ham, 1936; When the Jack Hollers, 1936 (was performed);
Don't You Want to Be Free?, 1937; Soul Gone Home, 1937; Emperor of Haiti, 1938; Front
Porch, 1939; Street Scene: an Opera in Two Acts (book by Elmer Rice, liberetto by LH, and
music by Kurt Weill), 1947; The Sun Do Move, 1942; Troubled Island: An Opera in Three Acts
(music by William Grant Still, liberetto by LH and Verna Arvey), 1949; Five Plays, 1963;
Jericho-Jim Crow (an off-Broadway song-play), 1964 Three Negro Plays, 1987; Black Nativity,
1992.

Study Questions
1. Langston Hughes' central purpose in writing was, in his own words, "to explain and illuminate
the Negro condition in America." How do the poems in this volume (Selected Poems) illustrate
his attempt?

2. What effect does the image of rivers create in the Black's history? Why are the rivers ancient
and dusky?

3. What is the dream Hughes refers to in "Harlem"? Why might it explode rather than dry up?
Why should the poem be called "Harlem"?

4. Discuss what Hughes's poetry tells a reader about his theory of poetry.

5. Place Hughes's work in the context of Black musical forms invented in Harlem in the early
twentieth century. Is Black poetry the way Hughes writes it, like jazz, a new genre? If so, is it
invented or derivative? What are its characteristics? If "Black poetry" is a genre, does Countee
Cullen write in it?

6. Hughes's poetry makes room for the experiences of women. Analyze "Mother to Son,"
"Madam and Her Madam," and "Madam's Calling Card," and explore the way he turns women's
experiences into emblems of African-American experience.

7. Traditional critics have not called Hughes's poetry modernist, and yet his poetry reflects
modernism both in his themes, his use of the image, and in terms of style. Locate specific points
where you can see Hughes's modernism and demonstrate it in an essay.

Madam's Past History

from The Selected Poems of
Langston Hughes
My name is Johnson--
Madam Alberta K.
The Madam stands for business.
I'm smart that way.

I had a
HAIR-DRESSING PARLOR
Before
The depression put
The prices lower.

Then I had a
BARBECUE STAND
Till I got mixed up
With a no-good man.

Cause I had a insurance

The WPA
Said, We can't use you
Wealthy that way.

I said,
DON'T WORRY 'BOUT ME!
Just like the song,
You WPA folks take care of yourself--
And I'll get along.

I do cooking,
Day's work, too!
Alberta K. Johnson--
Madam to you.

Madam and the Rent Man

from The Selected Poems of
Langston Hughes

The rent man knocked.

He said, Howdy-do?
I said, What
Can I do for you?
He said, You know
Your rent is due.

I said, Listen,
Before I'd pay
I'd go to Hades
And rot away!

The sink is broke,

The water don't run,
And you ain't done a thing
You promised to've done.

Back window's cracked,

Kitchen floor squeaks,
There's rats in the cellar,
And the attic leaks.

He said, Madam,
It's not up to me.
I'm just the agent,
Don't you see?

I said, Naturally,
You pass the buck.
If it's money you want
You're out of luck.

He said, Madam,
I ain't pleased!
I said, Neither am I.

So we agrees!

Madam and Her Madam

from The Selected Poems of
Langston Hughes

I worked for a woman,

She wasn't mean--
But she had a twelve-room
House to clean.

Had to get breakfast,

Dinner, and Supper, too--
Then take care of her children
When I got through.

Wash, iron, and scrub,

Walk the dog around--
It was too much,
Nearly broke me down.

I said, Madam,
Can it be
You trying to make a
Pack-horse out of me?

She opened her mouth.

She cried, Oh, no!
You know, Alberta,
I love you so!

I said, Madam,
That may be true--
But I'll be dogged
If I love you!

Madam and the Census Man

from The Selected Poems of
Langston Hughes

The census man,

The day he came round,
Wanted my name
To put it down.

I said, JOHNSON,
ALBERTA K.
But he hated to write
The K that way.

He said, What
Does K stand for?
I said, K--
And nothing more.

He said, I'm gonna put it

KРAРY.
I said, If you do,
You lie.

My mother christened me
ALBERTA K.
You leave my name
Just that way!

He said, Mrs.,
(With a snort)
Just a K
Makes your name too short.

I said, I don't
Give a damn!
Leave me and my name
Just like I am!

Furthermore, rub out

That MRS., too--
I'll have you know
I'm Madam to you!

Enter the New Negro

The Negro Problem
By ALAIN LOCKE

IN the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of
the American Negro and the three norns who have traditionally presided over the Negro problem
have a changeling in their laps. The Sociologist, The Philanthropist, the Race-leader are not
unaware of the New Negro but they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be
swathed in their formulae. For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new
spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is
transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary
Negro life.

Could such a metamorphosis have taken place as suddenly as it has appeared to? The answer is
no; not because the New Negro is not here, but because the Old Negro had long become more of
a myth than a man. The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and
historical controversy. His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in
innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. The Negro himself has contributed his
share to this through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse
circumstances of dependence. So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been
more of a formula than a human being --a something to be argued about, condemned or
defended, to be "kept down," or "in his place," or "helped up," to be worried with or worried
over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. The thinking Negro even has
been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to
see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been
more real to him than his personality. Through having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes
of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends and benefactors he has
subscribed to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed. Little true social or
self-understanding has or could come from such a situation.

But while the minds of most of us, black and white, have thus burrowed in the trenches of the
Civil War and Reconstruction, the actual march of development has simply flanked these
positions, necessitating a sudden reorientation of view. We have not been watching in the right
direction; set worth and South on a sectional axis, eve have not noticed the East till the sun has
us blinking.

Recall how suddenly the Negro spirituals revealed themselves; suppressed for generations under
the stereotypes of Wesleyan hymn harmony, secretive, half-ashamed, until the courage of being
natural brought them out--and behold, there was folk-music. Similarly the mind of the Negro
seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking
off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the
Negro problem we are achieving somethinglike a spiritual emancipation. Until recently, lacking
selfunderstanding, we have been almost as much of a problem to ourselves as we still are to
others. But the decade that found us with a problem has left us with only a task. The multitude
perhaps feels as yet only a strange relief and a new vague urge, but the thinking few know that in
the reaction the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken.
With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to
enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there
may be of conditions from without. The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle
several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens
spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his
education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater
certainty of knowing what it is all about. From this comes the promise and warrant of a new
leadership. As one of them has discerningly put it:

We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.

Yesterday, a night-gone thing

A sun-down name.

And dawn today

Broad arch above the road we came.
We march!
This is what, even more than any "most creditable record of fifty years of freedom," requires that
the Negro of today be seen through other than the dusty spectacles of past controversy. The day
of "aunties," "uncles" and "mammies" is equally gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on,
and even the "Colonel" and "George" play barnstorm roles from which they escape with relief
when the public spotlight is off. The popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is
time to scrap the fictions, garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts.

FIRST we must observe some of the changes which since the traditional lines of opinion were
drawn have rendered these quite obsolete. A main change has been, of course, that shifting of the
Negro population which has made the Negro problem no longer exclusively or even
predominantly Southern. Why should our minds remain sectionalized, when the problem itself
no longer is? Then the trend of migration has not only been toward the North and the Central
Midwest, but city-ward and to the great centers of industry--the problems of adjustment are new,
practical, local and not peculiarly racial. Rather they are an integral part of the large industrial
and social problems of our present-day democracy. And finally, with the Negro rapidly in
process of class differentiation, if it ever was warrantable to regard and treat the Negro en masse
it is becom ing with every day less possible, more unjust and more ridiculous.

The Negro too, for his part, has idols of the tribe to smash. If on the one hand the white man has
erred in making the Negro appear to be that which would excuse or extenuate his treatment of
him, the Negro, in turn, has too often unnecessarily excused himself because of the way he has
been treated. The intelligent Negro of today is resolved not to make discrimination an
extenuation for his shortcomings in performance, individual or collective; he is trying to hold
himself at par, neither inflated by sentimental allowances nor depreciated by current social
discounts. For this he must know himself and be known for precisely what he is, and for that
reason he welcomes the new scientific rather than the old sentimental interest. Sentimental
interest in the Negro has ebbed. We used to lament this as the falling off of our friends; now we
rejoice and pray to be delivered both from self-pity and condescension. The mind of each racial
group has had a bitter weaning, apathy or hatred on one side matching disillusionment or
resentment on the other; but they face each other today with the possibility at least of entirely
new mutual attitudes.

It does not follow that if the Negro were better known, he would be better liked or better treated.
But mutual understanding is basic for any subsequent cooperation and adjustment. The effort
toward this will at least have the effect of remedying in large part what has been the most
unsatisfactory feature of our present stage of race relationships in America, namely the fact that
the more intelligent and representative elements of the two race groups have at so many points
got quite out of vital touch with one another.

The fiction is that the life of the races is separate and increasingly so. The fact is that they have
touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels.

While inter-racial councils have sprung up in the South, drawing on forward elements of both
races, in the Northern cities manual laborers may brush elbows in their everyday work, but the
community and business leaders have experienced no such interplay or far too little of it. These
segments must achieve contact or the race situation in America becomes desperate. Fortunately
this is happening. There is a growing realization that in social effort the cooperative basis must
supplant long-distance philanthropy, and that the only safeguard for mass relations in the future
must be provided in the carefully maintained contacts of the enlightened minorities of both race
groups. In the intellectual realm a renewed and keen curiosity is replacing the recent apathy; the
Negro is being carefully studied, not just talked about and discussed. In art and letters, instead of
being wholly caricatured, he is being seriously portray eel and painted .

To all of this the New Negro is keenly responsive as an augury of a new democracy in American
culture. He is contributing his share to the new social understanding. But the desire to be
understood would never in itself have been sufficient to have opened so completely the
protectively closed portals of the thinking Negro's mind. There is still too much possibility of
being snubbed or patronized for that. It was rather the necessity for fuller, truer, self-expression,
the realization of the unwisdom of allowing social discrimination to segregate him mentally, and
a counter-attitude to cramp and fetter his own living--and so the "spite-wall" that the intellectuals
built over the "color-line" has happily been taken down. Much of this reopening of intellectual
Contacts has Entered in New York and has been richly fruitful not merely in the enlarging of
personal experience, but in the definite enrichment of American art and letters and in the
clarifying of our common vision of the social tasks ahead.

The particular significance in the reestablishment of contact between the more advanced and
representative classes is that it promises to offset some of the unfavorable reactions of the past,
or at least to re-surface race contacts somewhat for the future. Subtly the conditions that are
moulding a New Negro are moulding a new American attitude.

However, this new phase of things is delicate; it will call for less charity but more justice; less
help, but infinitely closer understanding. This is indeed a critical stage of race relationships
because of the likelihood, if the new temper is not understood, of engendering sharp group
antagonism and a second crop of more calculated prejudice. In some quarters, it has already done
so. Having weaned the Negro, public opinion cannot continue to paternalize. The Negro today is
inevitably moving forward under the control largely of his own objectives. What are these
objectives? Those of his outer life are happily already well and finally formulated, for they are
none other than the ideals of American institutions and democracy. Those of his inner life are yet
in process of formation, for the new psychology at present is more of a consensus of feeling than
of opinion, of attitude rather than of program. Still some points seem to have crystallized.

UP to the present one may adequately describe the Negro's "inner objectives" as an attempt to
repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a warped social perspective. Their realization
has required a new mentality for the American Negro. And as it matures we begin to see its
effects; at first, negative, iconoclastic, and then positive and constructive. In this new group
psychology we note the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive
self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual
recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and "touchy" nerves, the repudiation of the double standard of
judgment with its special philanthropic allowances and then the sturdier desire for objective and
scientific appraisal; and finally the rise from social disillusionment to race pride, from the sense
of social debt to the responsibilities of social contribution, and offsetting the necessary working
and commonsense acceptance of restricted conditions, the belief in ultimate esteem and
recognition. Therefore the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and
shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he
is not. He resents being spoken for as a social ward or minor, even by his own, and to being
regarded a chronic patient for the sociological clinic, the sick man of American Democracy. For
the same reasons he himself is through with those social nostrums and panaceas, the so-called
"solutions" of his "problem," with which he and the country have been so liberally dosed in the
past. Religion, freedom, education, money--in turn, he has ardently hoped for and peculiarly
trusted these things; he still believes in them, but not in blind trust that they alone will solve his
life-problem.

Each generation, however, will have its creed and that of the present is the belief in the efficacy
of collective efforts in race cooperation. This deep feeling of race is at present the mainspring of
Negro life. It seems to be the outcome of the reaction to proscription and prejudice; an attempt,
fairly successful on the whole, to convert a defensive into an offensive position, a handicap into
an incentive. It is radical in tone, but not in purpose and only the most stupid forms of
opposition, misunderstanding or persecution could make it otherwise. Of course, the thinking
Negro has shifted a little toward the left with the world-trend, and there is an increasing group
who affiliate with radical and liberal movements. But fundamentally for the present the Negro is
radical on race matters, conservative on others, in other words, a "forced radical," a social
protestant rather than a genuine radical. Yet under further pressure and injustice iconoclastic
thought and motives will inevitably increase. Harlem's quixotic radicalisms call for their ounce
of democracy today lest tomorrow they be beyond cure.

The Negro mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants, American ideas. But this
forced attempt to build his Americanism on race values is a unique social experiment, and its
ultimate success is impossible except through the fullest sharing of American culture and
institutions. There should be no delusion about this. American nerves in sections unstrung with
race hysteria are often fed the opiate that the trend of Negro advance is wholly separatist, and
that the effect of its operation will be to encyst the Negro as a benign foreign body in the body
politic. This cannot be--even if it were desirable. The racialism of the Negro is no limitation or
reservation with respect to American life; it is only a constructive effort to build the obstructions
in the stream of his progress into an efficient dam of social energy and power. Democracy itself
is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any of its channels are closed. Indeed they cannot
be selectively closed. So the choice is not between one way for the Negro and another way for
the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals
progressively fulfilled and realized on the other.

There is, of course, a warrantably comfortable feeling in being on the right side of the country's
professed ideals. We realize that we cannot be undone without America's undoing. It is within
the gamut of this attitude that the thinking Negro faces America, but the variations of mood in
connection with it are if anything more significant than the attitude itself. Sometimes we have it
taken with the defiant ironic challenge of McKay:

Mine is the future grinding down today

Like a great landslip moving to the sea,
Bearing its freight of debris far away
Where the green hungry waters restlessly
Heave mammoth pyramids and break and roar
Their eerie challenge to the crumbling shore.
Sometimes, perhaps more frequently as yet, in the fervent and almost filial appeal and counsel of
Weldon Johnson's:

O Southland, dear Southland!

Then why do you still cling
To an idle age and a musty page,
To a dead and useless thing.

But between defiance and appeal, midway almost between cynicism and hope, the prevailing
mind stands in the mood of the same author's To America, an attitude of sober query and stoical
challenge:

How would you have us, as we are?

Or sinking heath the load we bear,
Our eyes fixed forward on a star,
Or gazing empty at despair?

Rising or falling? Men or things?

With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?
Strong, willing sinews in your wings,
Or tightening chains about your feet?

More and more, however, an intelligent realization of the great discrepancy between the
American social creed and the American social practice forces upon the Negro the taking of the
moral advantage that is his. Only the steadying and sobering effect of a truly characteristic
gentleness of spirit prevents the rapid rise of a definite cynicism and counter-hate and a defiant
superiority feeling. Human as this reaction would be, the majority still deprecate its advent, and
would gladly see it forestalled by the speedy amelioration of its causes. We wish our race pride
to be a healthier, more positive achievement than a feeling based upon a realization of the
shortcomings of others. But all paths toward the attainment of a sound social attitude have been
difficult; only a relatively few enlightened minds have been able as the phrase puts it "to rise
above" prejudice. The ordinary man has had until recently only a hard choice between the
alternatives of supine and humiliating submission and stimulating but hurtful counter-prejudice.
Fortunately from some inner, desperate resourcefulness has recently sprung up the simple
expedient of fighting prejudice by mental passive resistance, in other words by trying to ignore
it. For the few, this manna may perhaps be effective, but the masses cannot thrive on it.

FORTUNATELY there are constructive channels opening out into which the balked social
feelings of the American Negro can flow freely.

Without them there would be much more pressure and danger than there is. These compensating
interests are racial but in a new and enlarged way. One is the consciousness of acting as the
advance-guard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization; the
other, the sense of a mission of rehabilitating the race in world esteem from that loss of prestige
for which the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible. Harlem, as we
shall see, is the center of both these movements; she is the home of the Negro's "Zionism." The
pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem. A Negro newspaper carrying news
material in English, French and Spanish, gathered from all quarters of America, the West Indies
and Africa has maintained itself in Harlem for over five years. Two important magazines, both
edited from New York, maintain their news and circulation consistently on a cosmopolitan scale.
Under American auspices and backing, three pan-African congresses have been held abroad for
the discussion of common interests, colonial questions and the future cooperative development
of Africa. In terms of the race question as a world problem, the Negro mind has leapt, so to
speak, upon the parapets of prejudice and extended its cramped horizons. In so doing it has
linked up with the growing group consciousness of the dark-peoples and is gradually learning
their common interests. As one of our writers has recently put it: "It is imperative that we
understand the white world in its relations to the nonwhite world." As with the Jew, persecution
is making the Negro international.

As a world phenomenon this wider race consciousness is a different thing from the much
asserted rising tide of color. Its inevitable causes are not of our making. The consequences are
not necessarily damaging to the best interests of civilization. Whether it actually brings into
being new Armadas of conflict or argosies of cultural exchange and enlightenment can only be
decided by the attitude of the dominant races in an era of critical change. With the American
Negro his new internationalism is primarily an effort to recapture contact with the scattered
peoples of African derivation. Garveyism may be a transient, if spectacular, phenomenon, but the
possible role of the American Negro in the future development of Africa is one of the most
constructive and universally helpful missions that any modern people can lay claim to.

Constructive participation in such causes cannot help giving the Negro valuable group
incentives, as well as increased prestige at home and abroad. Our greatest rehabilitation may
possibly come through such channels, but for the present, more immediate hope rests in the
revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and
cultural contributions, past and prospective. It must be increasingly recognized that the Negro
has already made very substantial contributions, not only in his folk-art, music especially, which
has always found appreciation, but in larger, though humbler and less acknowledged ways. For
generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most
undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience,
but spiritually as well. The South has unconsciously absorbed the gift of his folk-temperament.
In less than half a generation it will be easier to recognize this, but the fact remains that a leaven
of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South
from a humble, unacknowledged source. A second crop of the Negro's gifts promises still more
largely. He now becomes a conscious contributor and lays aside the status of d beneficiary and
ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization. The great social gain in
this is the releasing of our talented group from the arid fields of controversy and debate to the
productive fields of creative expression. The especially cultural recognition they win should in
turn prove the key to that revaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany any
considerable further betterment of race relationships. But whatever the general effect, the present
generation will have added the motives of self-expression and spiritual development to the old
and still unfinished task of making material headway and progress. No one who understandingly
faces the situation with its substantial accomplishment or views the new scene with its still more
abundant promise can be entirely without hope. And certainly, if in our lifetime the Negro should
not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the
warrant of these things, celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of
group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.
Robert Browning
(1812-1889)

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812,

in Camberwell (a suburb of London), the first child
of Robert and Sarah Anna Browning. His mother
was a fervent Evangelical and an accomplished
pianist. Mr. Browning had angered his own father
and forgone a fortune: the poet's grandfather had
sent his son to oversee a West Indies sugar
plantation, but the young man had found the
institution of slavery so abhorrent that he gave up his
prospects and returned home, to become a clerk in
the Bank of England. On this very modest salary he
was able to marry, raise a family, and to acquire a
library of 6000 volumes. He was an exceedingly
well-read man who could recreate the seige of Troy
with the household chairs and tables for the benefit
of his inquisitive son.

Indeed, most of the poet's education came at home. He was an extremely bright child and a
voracious reader (he read through all fifty volumes of the Biographie Universelle ) and learned
Latin, Greek, French and Italian by the time he was fourteen. He attended the University of
London in 1828, the first year it opened, but left in discontent to pursue his own reading at his
own pace. This somewhat idiosyncratic but extensive education has led to difficulties for his
readers: he did not always realize how obscure were his references and allusions.

In the 1830's he met the actor William Macready and tried several times to write verse drama for
the stage. At about the same time he began to discover that his real talents lay in taking a single
character and allowing him to discover himself to us by revealing more of himself in his
speeches than he suspects-the characteristics of the dramatic monologue. The reviews of
Paracelsus (1835) had been mostly encouraging, but the difficulty and obscurity of his long
poem Sordello (1840) turned the critics against him, and for many years they continued to
complain of obscurity even in his shorter, more accessible lyrics.

In 1845 he saw Elizabeth Barrett's Poems and contrived to meet her. Although she was an invalid
and very much under the control of a domineering father, the two married in September 1846
and a few days later eloped to Italy, where they lived until her death in 1861. The years in
Florence were among the happiest for both of them. Her love for him was demonstrated in the
Sonnets from the Portugese, and to her he dedicated Men and Women, which contains his best
poetry. Public sympathy for him after her death (she was a much more popular poet during their
lifetimes) surely helped the critical reception of his Collected Poems (1862) and Dramatis
Personae (1863). The Ring and the Book (1868-9), based on an "old yellow book" which told of
a Roman murder and trial, finally won him considerable popularity. He and Tennyson were now
mentioned together as the foremost poets of the age. Although he lived and wrote actively for
another twenty years, the late '60s were the peak of his career. His influence continued to grow,
however, and finally lead to the founding of the Browning Society in 1881. He died in 1889, on
the same day that his final volume of verse, Asolando, was published. He is buried in Poet's
Corner of Westminster Abbey.
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
My Star

All that I know

Of a certain star,
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue,
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

1 Oh, to be in England
2Now that April's there,
3And whoever wakes in England
4Sees, some morning, unaware,
5That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
6Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
7While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
8In England--now!

9 And after April, when May follows,

10And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
11Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
12Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
13Blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge--
14That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
15Lest you should think he never could recapture
16The first fine careless rapture!
17And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
18All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
19The buttercups, the little children's dower
20--Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Among the Rocks

1Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,

2 This autumn morning! How he sets his bones
 3To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
4For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
5 Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
6The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.

7That is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true;

8 Such is life's trial, as old earth smiles and knows.
9If you loved only what were worth your love,
10Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
11 Make the low nature better by your throes!
12Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!

Youth and Art

1 It once might have been, once only:

2 We lodged in a street together,
3You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,
4 I, a lone she-bird of his feather.

5 Your trade was with sticks and clay,

6 You thumbed, thrust, patted and polished,
7Then laughed "They will see some day
8 Smith made, and Gibson demolished."

9 My business was song, song, song;

10 I chirped, cheeped, trilled and twittered,
11"Kate Brown's on the boards ere long,
12 And Grisi's existence embittered!"

13 I earned no more by a warble

14 Than you by a sketch in plaster;
15You wanted a piece of marble,
16 I needed a music-master.

17 We studied hard in our styles,

18 Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos,
19For air looked out on the tiles,
20 For fun watched each other's windows.

21 You lounged, like a boy of the South,

22 Cap and blouse--nay, a bit of beard too;
23Or you got it, rubbing your mouth
24 With fingers the clay adhered to.

25 And I--soon managed to find

26 Weak points in the flower-fence facing,
27Was forced to put up a blind
28 And be safe in my corset-lacing.

29 No harm! It was not my fault

30 If you never turned your eye's tail up
31As I shook upon E in alt,
 32 Or ran the chromatic scale up:

33 For spring bade the sparrows pair,

34 And the boys and girls gave guesses,
35And stalls in our street looked rare
36 With bulrush and watercresses.

37 Why did not you pinch a flower

38 In a pellet of clay and fling it?
39Why did not I put a power
40 Of thanks in a look, or sing it?

41 I did look, sharp as a lynx,

42 (And yet the memory rankles,)
43When models arrived, some minx
44 Tripped up-stairs, she and her ankles.

45 But I think I gave you as good!

46 "That foreign fellow,--who can know
47How she pays, in a playful mood,
48 For his tuning her that piano?"

49 Could you say so, and never say

50 "Suppose we join hands and fortunes,
51And I fetch her from over the way,
52 Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes?"

53 No, no: you would not be rash,

54 Nor I rasher and something over:
55You've to settle yet Gibson's hash,
56 And Grisi yet lives in clover.

57 But you meet the Prince at the Board,

58 I'm queen myself at bals-paré,
59I've married a rich old lord,
60 And you're dubbed knight and an R.A.

61 Each life unfulfilled, you see;

62 It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
63We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
64 Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy.

65 And nobody calls you a dunce,

66 And people suppose me clever:
67This could but have happened once,
68 And we missed it, lost it for ever.

Life in a Love

1Escape me?
2Never--
3Beloved!
 4While I am I, and you are you,
5 So long as the world contains us both,
6 Me the loving and you the loth,
7While the one eludes, must the other pursue.
8My life is a fault at last, I fear:
9It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
10Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed.
11But what if I fail of my purpose here?
12It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
13To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
14And, baffled, get up and begin again,--
15So the chace takes up one's life, that's all.
16While, look but once from your farthest bound
17At me so deep in the dust and dark,
18No sooner the old hope goes to ground
19Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
20I shape me--
21Ever
22Removed!

My Last Duchess

FERRARA

1That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,

2Looking as if she were alive. I call
3That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
4Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
5Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said
6"Frà Pandolf" by design, for never read
7Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
8The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
9But to myself they turned (since none puts by
10The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
11And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
12How such a glance came there; so, not the first
13Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
14Her husband's presence only, called that spot
15Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
16Frà Pandolf chanced to say, "Her mantle laps
17Over my Lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
18Must never hope to reproduce the faint
19Half-flush that dies along her throat"; such stuff
20Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
21For calling up that spot of joy. She had
22A heart . . . how shall I say? . . . too soon made glad,
23Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
24She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
25Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
26The dropping of the daylight in the West,
27The bough of cherries some officious fool
 28Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
29She rode with round the terrace--all and each
30Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
31Or blush, at least. She thanked men,--good; but thanked
32Somehow . . . I know not how . . . as if she ranked
33My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
34With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
35This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
36In speech--(which I have not)--to make your will
37Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this
38Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
39Or there exceed the mark"--and if she let
40Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
41Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
42--E'en then would be some stooping; and I chuse
43Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
44Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
45Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
46Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
47As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet
48The company below, then. I repeat,
49The Count your Master's known munificence
50Is ample warrant that no just pretence
51Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
52Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
53At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
54Together down, Sir! Notice Neptune, though,
55Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
56Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.

Notes

1] First published in Dramatic Lyrics, 1842; given its present title in 1849 (Dramatic Romances
and Lyrics).
The emphasis in the title is on last, as the ending of the poem makes clear; the Duke is now
negotiating for his next Duchess. Fra Pandolf (line 3) and Claus of Innsbruck (line 54) are artists
of Browning's own invention. Title: emphasizing the word Last as the ending of the poem
implies; the Duke, identified as "Ferrara" in the poem's speech prefix, is negotiating for his next
Duchess. In 1842 the title was "Italy and France. I. -- Italy" (then the poem was paired with
"Count Gismond: Aix in Provence," which followed). Ferrara: most likely, Browning intended
Alfonso II (1533-1598), fifth duke of Ferrara, in northern Italy, from 1559 to 1597, and the last
member of the Este family. He married his first wife, 14-year-old Lucrezia, a daughter of the
Cosimo I de' Medici, in 1558 and three days later left her for a two-year period. She died, 17
years old, in what some thought suspicious circumstances. Alfonso contrived to meet his second
to-be spouse, Barbara of Austria, in Innsbruck in July 1565. Nikolaus Mardruz, who took orders
from Ferdinand II, count of Tyrol, led Barbara's entourage then. This source was discovered by
Louis S. Friedland and published in "Ferrara and My Last Duchess," Studies in Philology 33
(1936): 656-84.

3] Frà Pandolf: a painter not recorded in history, a member of religious orders and so, on the
surface of things, unlikely to have seduced the Duchess. No known painting has been linked to
Browning's poem.
6] by design: when put the query, "By what design?", Browning answered: "To have some
occasion for telling the story, and illustrating part of it" (A. Allen Brockington, "Robert
Browning's Answers to Questions concerning some of his Poems," Cornhill Magazine [March
1914]: 316).

13] you: presumably Browning had in mind Nikolaus Mardruz.

16] mantle: loose cloak without sleeves.

22] When questioned, "Was she in fact shallow and easily and equally well pleased with any
favour or did the Duke so describe her as a supercilious cover to real and well justified
jealousy?" Browning answered: "As an excuse -- mainly to himself -- for taking revenge on one
who had unwittingly wounded his absurdly pretentious vanity, by failing to recognise his
superiority in even the most trifling matters" (Brockington).

25] My favour: a love-gift such as a ribbon.

30] approving: "forward" in 1842.

33] a nine-hundred-years-old name: Lucruzia's family, the Medici, had their recent origin in
merchants, but the Este family went back 650 years (Complete Works, III [1971]: 372).

36] to make: "could make" in 1842.

39] exceed the mark: overshoot the target (from archery).

40] lessoned: put to school, instructed; possibly punning on "lessened," `diminished.'

45] I gave commands: when asked what this meant, Browning said first, "I meant that the
commands were that she should be put to death," but then continued, "with a characteristic dash
of expression, and as if the thought had just started in his mind, `Or he might have had her shut
up in a convent"' (Hiram Corson, An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry, 3rd
edn. [Boston, 1899]: viii).

49] The Count: presumably Ferdinand II, count of Tyrol, who led the negotiations for the
marriage of Alfonso II and Barbara of Austria.

54] Neptune: the Roman god of the sea, whose chariot is often shown pulled by sea-horses.

56] Claus of Innsbruck: a painter not recorded historically, from an Italian city, renowned for its
sculpture, that Browning visited in 1838.

Commentary by Ian Lancashire

(2002/9/9)

We always drop unprepared into a Browning dramatic monologue, into several lives about which
we know nothing. Soliloquies or speeches in a play have a context that orients the audience.
Browning's readers have only a title and, in "My Last Duchess," a speech prefix, "Ferrara." Yet
these are transfixing clues to a drama that we observe, helplessly, unable to speak or to act, as if
we turned on a radio and, having selected a frequency, overhear a very private conversation,
already in process and, as we may come very gradually to appreciate, about a murder and the
maybe-killer's search for the next victim. Readers familiar with Browning's writing and sensitive
to nuance perceive the speaker's pride and cold-bloodedness. Many miss the point and are
astonished. "You say what? there's nothing in the poem about him killing her! where do you find
that?" A century and more ago, when Browning still lived, readers presented him with questions
about this poem. He answered them cautiously, almost as if he had not written the poem but was
seeing it himself, attentively, after a very long time and was trying to understand what had
happened.

Thanks to Louis S. Friedland, a critic who published an article on "My Last Duchess" in 1936,
we know something about how young Browning found the story. Fascinated with the
Renaissance period, he visited Italy in 1838 and clearly had done considerable reading about its
history. He must have come across a biography of Alfonso II (1533-1598), fifth duke of Ferrara,
who married Lucrezia, the 14-year-old daughter of the upstart merchant princes, the Medici, in
1558. Three days after the wedding, Alfonso left her -- for two years. She died barely 17 years
old, and people talked, and four years later in Innsbruck, Alfonso began negotiating for a new
wife with a servant of the then count of Tyrol, one Nikolaus Mardruz. The poem's duke of
Ferrara, his last duchess, the "Count" with whose servant (Mardruz) Ferrara is here discussing re-
marriage and a dowry, and the new "fair daughter" are historical, but the interpretation of what
actually took place among them is Browning's own. He first published the poem in 1842, four
years after his visit to Italy. The painter Frà Pandolf and the sculptor Claus of Innsbruck are
fictitious, as far as we know, but Browning must have meant his readers to associate the poem
with these shadowy historical figures because he changed the title in 1849, from "Italy and
France. I. -- Italy." to ... what we see today.

The title evidently refers to a wall painting that Ferrara reveals to someone yet unidentified in the
first fourteen words of the poem. "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall," he says. However
a reader utters this line, it sounds odd. Stress "That's" and Ferrara reduces a woman, once his
spouse, to something he casually points out, a thing on a wall. Emphasize "my" and Ferrara
reveals his sense of owning her. Pause over "last" and we might infer that duchesses, to him,
come in sequence, like collectibles that, if necessary, having become obsolescent, are to be
replaced. If "Duchess" gets the stress, he implies -- or maybe we infer -- that he acquires, not just
works of art, but persons; and that Duchesses are no different from paintings. The line suggests
self-satisfaction. Finding ourselves being given a tour of a grand home for the first time, by the
owner himself, and being told, "That's my last wife painted on the wall," how would we react?
We might think, "How odd he didn't say her name. I wonder what happened ...", or at least we
might wonder until he finished his sentence with "Looking as if she were alive." This clause, also
sounding peculiar, tells us two things. The Duchess looks out at us, the viewers, directly from the
painting; and her depiction there is life-like, that is, we might be looking at a living person rather
than a work of art. Yet wouldn't Ferrara say "life-like" or "true to life," if that was simply what
he meant? His choice of words may suggest that, while she, the Duchess herself (rather than her
image in the painting), looks alive, she may be dead; and the phrase "last Duchess" echoes in our
working memory. Do we know for sure? Does "she" mean the Duchess or her painting?

Ferrara continues, cheerfully, describing the painting, not the Duchess (so possibly we are being
silly): "I call / That piece a wonder, now." The phrase "That piece" must mean "that portrait,"
surely, though there is something intangibly common, almost vulgar, in his expression. That
sense of "piece," as "portrait," is archaic now and may have been so when Browning wrote the
poem (OED "piece" sb. 17b). This context, a man speaking of pictures of women, connotes
something quite different, what the term has meant for centuries, and still means now, "Applied
to a woman or girl. In recent use, mostly depreciatory, of a woman or girl regarded as a sexual
object" (OED sb. 9b). Is "That piece" a portrait or a sl-t, a b-tch, a c-nt? Ferrara's next remark
keeps us off-balance. "Frà Pandolf's hands / Worked busily a day, and there she stands."
Obviously the "piece" is something hand-made, a painting, a wondrous good one, not a person,
not someone contemptible -- a relief; and yet Ferrara continues, "there she stands." The painting
cannot stand because it is on the wall. Is he speaking about the woman? Ferrara then invites his
listener, standing beside him, to sit down "and look at her." As readers, Ferrara also speaks to us,
as if we too were there, because Browning, who as a lyric poet would address us directly, has
disappeared behind this character. We may want to sit down. Mid-way through line 5, Ferrara
has not yet done with us. We have to look at the Duchess, through his words, being just as silent
as the "you" to whom Ferrara refers. We have to "read" (6) her face.

As "Strangers" (7), knowing nothing about this place and its people, we must be told (and
Ferrara will explain) why he named, "by design," the painter, giving him the honorific, "Frà"
('brother'), due a member of religious orders and a celibate man. The Duchess's look -- her
"pictured countenance,/ The depth and passion of its earnest glance", and that "glance" (again) --
causes ignorant observers, if they dare (11), to look as if they would ask Ferrara, and only
Ferrara, because (as he tells us pointedly) the portrait is curtained off, and only he can pull back
the curtain to reveal it, just what elicited that "passion" in her. His listener does not ask this
question, though he may look as if he would like to ask. He just sits where he is told to sit and
hears what others, of his type, would sometimes want to ask (but in fact seldom do ask) and,
more, hears what Ferrara would say in answer to that rare question. Was she looking at a lover,
at sometime who desired her? That is one question her look suggests, but of course that is
impossible, for Frà Pandolf, a celibate religious, could never bring forth that "passion." No, her
look did not rise, Ferrara implies, from sexual passion, but from a more general emotion. "Sir, 't
was not / Her husband's presence only, called that spot / Of joy into the Duchess' cheek." If
"presence" meant just "the state of being in the same place", it would be redundant here. Ferrara
uses the term to allude to the importance of his decision to be with her, the stateliness and
majesty that a duke confers, as a gift, on anyone by just turning up; and add to that, possibly, the
way he, as her sexual partner, ought to arouse her, nature being what it is, to colour in this way.

Yet any "courtesy," Ferrara asserts, any court compliment owing to the Duchess merely by virtue
of her position, aroused that look, that "spot of joy," that "blush" (31). Frà Pandolf, for example,
might have observed that the Duchess should shift her mantle up her arm somewhat to show
more of her wrist, its skin being attractive; or he might have complained that his art was not up
to capturing the "faint / Half-flush that dies along" her throat. If it died in the throat, where did it
live? Frà Pandolf alludes here to the "spot of joy," spreading downwards from her cheeks (15) as
he was painting her. Her embarrassed, but not at all displeased, awareness that someone likes her
reveals itself in a blush, a colouring in a small patch ("a spot") as blood flows to the face. That,
Ferrara says, reveals a "joy" felt by the Duchess in herself, at being herself, at being looked at
approvingly, no matter who -- whether a celibate painter, or her husband the duke -- did the
looking.

Now, standing before her portrait, where she stands, by the side of a listener made to sit, Ferrara
obsessively reviews the reasons why that joy was "a spot," a contaminant that should not have
been on his last Duchess' cheek. The more he talks, the more his contempt and self-justifying
anger show, and the more he endears the Duchess to us. Unable to recognize "courtesy" as
insincere, she was made happy by it, in fact, took joy in "whate'er /She looked on, and her looks
went everywhere." A sprig of flowers from the duke for her bosom (25) and his ancestral name
itself (33) meant joy to her, no less than a sunset, a courtier's gift of some cherries from the tree,
and the white mule whom she rode "round the terrace" (29). She smiled on him, whenever he
"passed" her (44), though sharing the same smile with anyone else. Her humility and general
good nature, however, disgusted (38) Ferrara for the way they seemed to trifle (35) with, or
understate the value of his own gift, a place in a noble family 900 years old. Lacking the cunning
to discriminate publicly, to flatter Ferrara, she also could not detect his outrage; and he said
nothing to her about what he felt. She wore her feelings openly, in her face, but to the standing
Duke any outward expression of his concern would have meant "stooping" (34, 43), that is,
lowering himself to her level. He attributes this silence to his lack of "skill / In speech", an
excuse that the poem itself disproves. When he describes her as missing or exceeding the "mark"
(38-39), Ferrara develops his metaphor from archery, as if she was one of his soldiers, competing
in a competition for prizes (his name), rather than a Duchess who was herself the prize.

"This grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands / As if alive."
This elliptical chain of four curt, bleak sentences brings Ferrara back to where he started. If the
Duchess smiled everywhere, could her smiles be stopped by anything short of death by
execution? What Ferrara's commands were, he does not say, but "As if alive", the second time he
uses the phrase, has a much more ominous sound. At the beginning, Ferrara could indeed be
speaking mainly about the "life-like" portrait, but as his anger grew, he shifted to the Duchess
herself. She cannot be "life-like." Even had he just divorced her and put her in a convent, as
Browning thought possible late in his life -- as if the poem somehow lived independent from him
-- Ferrara killed the joy that defined the "depth and passion" of her being. He finally controlled
before whom she could "blush." He alone draws back the curtain on the portrait.

Then Ferrara invites his listener and us to rise from being seated and "meet / The company
below" (47-48). When negotiating with the listener's master the Count for a dowry, Ferrara
"stoops." He not only lowers himself to the level of a mere count but generously offers to "go /
Together down" with the listener, a servant, side by side, instead of following him and so
maintaining symbolically a duke's superior level and rank. For all his obsession with his noble
lineage, Ferrara bargains with it openly.

Will Ferrara "repeat" (48) in marriage as he does in his speech? He claims the Count's "fair
daughter's self" is his "object." Will she too, an objective achieved, become a thing, found on a
wall like his last Duchess? Ferrara hints at his intentions by pointing out a second work of art,
this time a sculpture, as he reaches the staircase. Neptune, the sea-god, is "Taming a sea-horse"
(55), as Ferrara tamed his last Duchess.

In this poem Browning develops an idiolect for Ferrara. Unlike poets like Gray and Keats,
Browning does not write as himself, for example, by echoing the work of other poets, because to
do so would be untrue to the Duke's character. Ferrara betrays his obsessions by nervous
mannerisms. He repeats words associated with the Duchess: the phrases `as if ... alive" (2, 47),
`there she stands' (4, 46), `Will 't please you' (5, 47), and `called/calling ... that spot of joy' (14-
15, 21), `look,' variously inflected (2, 5, 24), `glance' (8, 12), `thanked' (31), `gift' (33-34), `stoop'
(34, 42-43), `smile' (43, 45-46), and `pass' (44). These tics define his idiolect but also his mind,
circling back to the same topic again and again. He takes pride in saying, "I repeat" (48). He also
obsesses about his height, relative to others. He stands because the Duchess stands on the wall,
and he requires his listener to sit, to rise, and to walk downstairs with him side-by-side. He
abhors stooping because he would lose face. Last, Ferrara needs to control the eyes of others. He
curtains off the Duchess' portrait to prevent her from looking "everywhere." He tells his listener
to look at her and to "Notice Neptune."

Caliban upon Setebos

Or, Natural Theology in the Island

"Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself."

(David, Psalms 50.21)
 1['Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
2Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,
3With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin.
4And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
5And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
6Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh:
7And while above his head a pompion-plant,
8Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
9Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
10And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
11And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,--
12He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
13And recross till they weave a spider-web
14(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times)
15And talks to his own self, howe'er he please,
16Touching that other, whom his dam called God.
17Because to talk about Him, vexes--ha,
18Could He but know! and time to vex is now,
19When talk is safer than in winter-time.
20Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep
21In confidence he drudges at their task,
22And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe,
23Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.]

24Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!

25'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon.

26'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,

27But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
28Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
29Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
30And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.

31'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:

32He hated that He cannot change His cold,
33Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish
34That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived,
35And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
36O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
37A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave;
38Only, she ever sickened, found repulse
39At the other kind of water, not her life,
40(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun)
41Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
42And in her old bounds buried her despair,
43Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.

44'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,

45Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
46Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
47Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
48That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
49He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
50By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
51That pricks deep into oak warts for a worm,
52And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
53But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
54That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
55About their hole--He made all these and more,
56Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
57He could not, Himself, make a second self
58To be His mate; as well have made Himself:
59He would not make what He mislikes or slights,
60An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains:
61But did, in envy, listlessness or sport,
62Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be--
63Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
64Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,
65Things He admires and mocks too,--that is it.
66Because, so brave, so better though they be,
67It nothing skills if He begin to plague.
68Look, now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash,
69Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived,
70Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,--
71Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all,
72Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain;
73Last, throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme,
74And wanton, wishing I were born a bird.
75Put case, unable to be what I wish,
76I yet could make a live bird out of clay:
77Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban
78Able to fly?--for, there, see, he hath wings,
79And great comb like the hoopoe's to admire,
80And there, a sting to do his foes offence,
81There, and I will that he begin to live,
82Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns
83Of grigs high up that make the merry din,
84Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not.
85In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay,
86And he lay stupid-like,--why, I should laugh;
87And if he, spying me, should fall to weep,
88Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong,
89Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,--
90Well, as the chance were, this might take or else
91Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry,
92And give the mankin three sound legs for one,
93Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg
94And lessoned he was mine and merely clay.
95Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme,
96Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,
97Making and marring clay at will? So He.

98'Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,

99Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
100'Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
101That march now from the mountain to the sea;
102'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
103Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
104'Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
105Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
106'Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
107And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
108As it likes me each time, I do: so He.

109Well then, 'supposeth He is good i' the main,

110Placable if His mind and ways were guessed,
111But rougher than His handiwork, be sure!
112Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself,
113And envieth that, so helped, such things do more
114Than He who made them! What consoles but this?
115That they, unless through Him, do nought at all,
116And must submit: what other use in things?
117'Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint
118That, blown through, gives exact the scream o' the jay
119When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue:
120Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay
121Flock within stone's throw, glad their foe is hurt:
122Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth
123"I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing,
124I make the cry my maker cannot make
125With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!'
126Would not I smash it with my foot? So He.

127But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease?

128Aha, that is a question! Ask, for that,
129What knows,--the something over Setebos
130That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought,
131Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance.
132There may be something quiet o'er His head,
133Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
134Since both derive from weakness in some way.
135I joy because the quails come; would not joy
136Could I bring quails here when I have a mind:
137This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth.
138'Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch,
139But never spends much thought nor care that way.
140It may look up, work up,--the worse for those
141It works on! 'Careth but for Setebos
142The many-handed as a cuttle-fish,
143Who, making Himself feared through what He does,
144Looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar
145To what is quiet and hath happy life;
146Next looks down here, and out of very spite
147Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real,
148These good things to match those as hips do grapes.
149'Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport.
150Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books
151Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle:
152Vexed, 'stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped,
153Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words;
154Has peeled a wand and called it by a name;
155Weareth at whiles for an enchanter's robe
156The eyed skin of a supple oncelot;
157And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole,
158A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch,
159Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye,
160And saith she is Miranda and my wife:
161'Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane
162He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge;
163Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared,
164Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame,
165And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
166In a hole o' the rock and calls him Caliban;
167A bitter heart that bides its time and bites.
168'Plays thus at being Prosper in a way,
169Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He.
170His dam held that the Quiet made all things
171Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so.
172Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex.
173Had He meant other, while His hand was in,
174Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick,
175Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow,
176Or overscale my flesh 'neath joint and joint
177Like an orc's armour? Ay,--so spoil His sport!
178He is the One now: only He doth all.

179'Saith, He may like, perchance, what profits Him.

180Ay, himself loves what does him good; but why?
181'Gets good no otherwise. This blinded beast
182Loves whoso places flesh-meat on his nose,
183But, had he eyes, would want no help, but hate
184Or love, just as it liked him: He hath eyes.
185Also it pleaseth Setebos to work,
186Use all His hands, and exercise much craft,
187By no means for the love of what is worked.
188'Tasteth, himself, no finer good i' the world
189When all goes right, in this safe summer-time,
190And he wants little, hungers, aches not much,
191Than trying what to do with wit and strength.
192'Falls to make something: 'piled yon pile of turfs,
193And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk,
194And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each,
195And set up endwise certain spikes of tree,
196And crowned the whole with a sloth's skull a-top,
197Found dead i' the woods, too hard for one to kill.
198No use at all i' the work, for work's sole sake;
199'Shall some day knock it down again: so He.
200'Saith He is terrible: watch His feats in proof!
201One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope.
202He hath a spite against me, that I know,
203Just as He favours Prosper, who knows why?
204So it is, all the same, as well I find.
205'Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm
206With stone and stake to stop she-tortoises
207Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave,
208Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck,
209Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue,
210And licked the whole labour flat: so much for spite.
211'Saw a ball flame down late (yonder it lies)
212Where, half an hour before, I slept i' the shade:
213Often they scatter sparkles: there is force!
214'Dug up a newt He may have envied once
215And turned to stone, shut up Inside a stone.
216Please Him and hinder this?--What Prosper does?
217Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He!
218There is the sport: discover how or die!
219All need not die, for of the things o' the isle
220Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees;
221Those at His mercy,--why, they please Him most
222When . . . when . . . well, never try the same way twice!
223Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth.
224You must not know His ways, and play Him off,
225Sure of the issue. 'Doth the like himself:
226'Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears
227But steals the nut from underneath my thumb,
228And when I threat, bites stoutly in defence:
229'Spareth an urchin that contrariwise,
230Curls up into a ball, pretending death
231For fright at my approach: the two ways please.
232But what would move my choler more than this,
233That either creature counted on its life
234To-morrow and next day and all days to come,
235Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart,
236"Because he did so yesterday with me,
237And otherwise with such another brute,
238So must he do henceforth and always."--Ay?
239Would teach the reasoning couple what "must" means!
240'Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He.

241'Conceiveth all things will continue thus,

242And we shall have to live in fear of Him
243So long as He lives, keeps His strength: no change,
244If He have done His best, make no new world
245To please Him more, so leave off watching this,--
246If He surprise not even the Quiet's self
247Some strange day,--or, suppose, grow into it
248As grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we,
249And there is He, and nowhere help at all.
 250'Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop.
251His dam held different, that after death
252He both plagued enemies and feasted friends:
253Idly! He doth His worst in this our life,
254Giving just respite lest we die through pain,
255Saving last pain for worst,--with which, an end.
256Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire
257Is, not to seem too happy. 'Sees, himself,
258Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink,
259Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both.
260'Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball
261On head and tail as if to save their lives:
262Moves them the stick away they strive to clear.

263Even so, 'would have Him misconceive, suppose

264This Caliban strives hard and ails no less,
265And always, above all else, envies Him;
266Wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights,
267Moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh,
268And never speaks his mind save housed as now:
269Outside, 'groans, curses. If He caught me here,
270O'erheard this speech, and asked "What chucklest at?"
271'Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off,
272Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best,
273Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree,
274Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste:
275While myself lit a fire, and made a song
276And sung it, "What I hate, be consecrate
277To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate
278For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?"
279Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend,
280Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime,
281That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
282And conquer Setebos, or likelier He
283Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die.

284[What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!

285Crickets stop hissing: not a bird--or, yes,
286There scuds His raven that has told Him all!
287It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
288Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,
289And fast invading fires begin! White blaze--
290A tree's head snaps--and there, there, there, there, there,
291His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
292Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
293'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
294Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
295One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!]

Notes
1] The motto is from Psalms 1: 21. For the title character, see The Tempest, I, ii. The subtitle and
the motto indicate much of Browning's intention in the poem. "Natural theology" is distinguished
from (and here opposed to) "revealed theology"; natural theology being that system of thought
about God which man arrives at through the unaided use of his natural reason. To the Victorian
secularists, all theology was "natural theology"--that is, man-made. Their favourite theory was
that all religion was a projection by man of his own qualities. This is the theory which the text
chosen as motto condemns, and which Caliban's musings illustrate. Throughout he looks at his
own characteristics, and then ascribes them to his god, Setebos: "So he." What is conspicuous in
the poem is that there is no glimpse of what to Browning is true theology: the theology of a God
of Love. This comes to man (as to David in Saul) by revelation. The highest conception Caliban
can achieve by natural reason is of the Quiet--an indifferent, absentee, Epicurean God. His
Setebos is merely a God of arbitrary and jealous power. It is also noteworthy that Browning
includes in Caliban's theology not merely most of the doctrines of primitive religions, but also
some elements associated with branches of Christianity, particularly the narrower kind of
Calvinist sect. He is by implication rejecting these elements as part of his own definition of true
Christianity in terms of a God of Love. The passages in brackets at the beginning and end of the
poem represent Caliban's silent thoughts. The main part of the poem is spoken aloud, and
presents his attempt at a system. He is very much the "natural" man, but Browning gives him not
only a quick and vivid imagination, but a mind that follows the general systematic pattern of
thought used by writers on natural religion. He starts with the relation of his god to the universe,
and the problem of cosmology, and then moves systematically to consider his god's attributes,
and to try to evolve rules for worship and service. Caliban throughout speaks of himself in the
third person, usually without the pronoun. Browning indicates the omission of the pronoun by an
apostrophe.
William Cullen Bryant
(1794-1878)

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT was born at

Cummington, Hampshire County, Massachusetts,
November 3, 1794, and, after an unusually long and
active literary life, he died in New York, June 12,
1878.

His father was Peter Bryant, a physician of considerable literary culture, and a person who had
traveled quite extensively. The father took an unusual interest in the culture of his children, and
he was amply rewarded for all his pains. There is an unauthenticated tradition that the first
Bryant of whom there is any account in America, came over in the Mayflower. Mr. Stephen
Bryant came over from England, and was settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1836. Stephen's
son Ichabod was the father of Philip Bryant and Philip, of Peter, the father of William Cullen.

Bryant's mother was Miss Sarah Snell, of Mayflower stock, being a descendant of John Alden.
Thus our poet has an honorable and cultured ancestry. Strict Puritanical discipline was the order
of the day, hence the young poet's life did not fall in pleasant places, so far as recreations were
concerned. While the children were held with a steady hand, their educational and moral
interests were considered with conscientious earnestness.

For some time after his birth young Bryant was very frail, and the chances for living seemed
decided against him. His head was of such enormous size as to cause his father much uneasiness.
Dr. Bryant decided that the size of William's head must be reduced. He thought to accomplish
the desired result by giving the babe a cold bath daily. Accordingly two of his students took the
child each morning and plunged it, head and all, into a clear, cold spring that bubbled from the
ground near the house. Whether the size of the head was reduced or not, we are unable to tell,
but the world of popular literature has ample cause to rejoice over the massive size of Bryant's
head and heart and mind. In 1810, at the age of sixteen, he entered Williams College, in
Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he studied for two years. He soon distinguished himself for
his attainments in language and polite literature. In 1812 he withdrew from college and entered
upon the study of law. After three years of preparation he was admitted to the bar in 1815. He
practiced first at Plainfield, and afterward at Great Barrington. Bryant attained high standing in
the local and state courts, but his tastes inclined him rather to literature than the law.

Bryant's literary record commenced when he was only ten years of age, and even before that age
he communicated lines to the local papers. "With a precocity rivaling that of Cowley or
Chatterton, Bryant, at the age of thirteen, wrote a satirical poem on the Jeffersonian party, which
he published in 1808, under the title of "." By referring to history, you will notice that the
English orders in council had been issued in retaliation for the decrees of Napoleon. The above
action of foreign powers led Jefferson to lay an embargo on American shipping. This formed the
subject of Bryant's satire, "The Embargo." This poem and "The Spanish Revolution" were
published in 1808, and passed to a second edition in the succeeding year. The age of the author
was called in question, and his friends came forward with proofs that the lad was only thirteen
when he wrote the satire. "The Genius of Columbia" was written in 1810, and "An Ode for the
Fourth of July," in 1812. When he was only eighteen years of age he wrote the imperishable
poem, "Thanatopsis."

In the "Bryant Homestead Book," of 1870, is written the following: "It was here at Cammington,
while wandering in the primeval forests, over the floor of which were scattered the gigantic
trunks of fallen trees, moldering for long years, and suggesting an indefinitely remote antiquity,
and where silent rivulets crept along through the carpet of leaves, the spoil of thousands of
summers, that the poem entitled 'Thanatopsis' was composed. The young poet had read the
poems of Kirke White, which, edited by Southey, were published about that time, and a small
volume of Southey's miscellaneous poems; and some lines of those authors had kindled his
imagination, which, going forth over the face of the inhabitants of the globe, sought to bring
under one broad and comprehensive view the destinies of the human race in the present life, and
the perpetual rising and passing away of generation after generation who are nourished by the
fruits of its soil, and find a resting-place in its bosom." When the poem was sent to the "North
American Review," Richard H. Dana was so surprised at its excellence that he doubted whether
it was the product of an American. Bryant also contributed several prose articles to the
"Review." While in the practice of his profession he wrote some of his finest poems. Of these we
will name lines "To a Waterfowl," "Green River," "A Winter Piece," "The West Wind," "The
Burial-Place," "Blessed are they that Mourn," "No Man Knoweth his Sepulchre," "A Walk at
Sunset," and "The Hymn to Death." While Bryant was writing "The Hymn to Death," his father
was dying at the age of fifty-four. In the same year he married Miss Frances Fairchild, and also
published his first collection of verse. In 1821 Bryant wrote "The Ages'" and delivered it before
the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College. At that time our poet was recognized as a writer
of great merit. From that time till he left his profession and took up his pen for a support, he
wrote about thirty poems. We here name some of them: "The Indian Girl's Lament," "An Indian
Story," "Monument Mountain," "The Massacre at Scio," "Song of the Stars," "March," "The
Rivulet," "After a Tempest," "Hymn to the North Star," "A Forest Hymn," and "June." We pause
here to quote Bryant's wish that he might die
"in flowery June
When brooks send up a cheerful tune,
And groves a joyous sound;"

and to remark that in that beautiful month he passed to his rest.

This brings our poet to 1825, when, through the efforts of Mr. Sedgwick and Mr. Verplanck, he
was appointed assistant editor of the "New York Review" and "Atheneum Magazine." Bidding
adieu to courts and law books, he became a follower of Apollo. In 1825 Bryant removed to New
York to enter upon his new duties. The "Review" did not prosper, and in one year it was merged
into the "New York Literary Gazette." In a few months the magazine was consolidated with the
"United States Literary Gazette," which in turn passed into the "United States Review." These
publications were not profitable, although they contained the writings of such men as Bryant,
Halleck, Willis, Dan a, Bancroft and Longfellow. Our poet next connected himself with the
"Evening Post," and remained with that journal till his death. Between 1827 and 1830 he assisted
in the editorial management of the "Talisman," a very successful annual, and also contributed the
tales of "Medfield," and "The Skeleton's Cave" to a book entitled "Tales of the Glauber Spa." A
complete edition of his poems was published in New York in 1832, and in England about the
same time. The English edition was brought out through the influence of Washington Irving,
who wrote a laudatory preface. John Wilson praised the work in an article in "Blackwood's
Magazine" This volume established Bryant's reputation abroad, and made him almost as popular
in England as in America.

In 1834, the poet, rich in fame, sailed for Europe. He traveled through France, Italy, and
Germany. Returning to his native land, he spent several years in literary work, when in 1845 he
again crossed the ocean. In 1849 he made his third journey abroad, and extended his travels into
Egypt and Syria. He also traveled extensively over the various parts of the United States and
Cuba. The letters written by him in his wanderings were collected into book form, and entitled
"Letters of a Traveler." In 1857 and 1858 he again visited Europe, and, as the result of this
journey, soon appeared "Letters from Spain and other Countries." A new and complete edition of
his poems was printed in 1855; and in 1863 appeared a volume of new poems entitled "Thirty
Poems." In 1870 appeared his translation of the "Iliad," and in 1871 of the "Odyssey." These
great epics were translated into English blank verse, which were considered the best English
version in print. In 1876 Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay commenced a "History of the United
States," but the work was not complete when the poet died. The book was to extend through four
finely illustrated volumes.

Bryant was frequently called upon to pay public tributes to the memory of Americans. On the
death of the artist, Thomas Cole, in 1848, he pronounced a funeral oration; in 1852 he delivered
a lecture upon the life and writings of James Fenimore Cooper; and in 1860 he paid a similar
tribute to his friend Washington Irving; he made an address on the life and achievements of S. F.
B. Morse, on the occasion of the dedication of his statue in Central Park, New York, in 1871;
addresses on Shakespeare and Scott on similar occasions in 1872; and one on Mazzini in 1878;
on his return from which, a fall resulted in his death."

Bryant's prose writings are marked by pure and vigorous English, and he stands in the front rank
as a poet. We quote from Professor Wilson's review of the poet's first volume, published in
England: "The chief charm of Bryant's genius consists in a tender pensiveness, a moral
melancholy, breathing over all his contemplations, dreams, and reveries, even such as in the
main are glad, and giving assurance of a pure spirit, benevolent to all living creatures, and
habitually pious in the felt omnipresence of the Creator. His poetry overflows with natural
religion--with what Wordsworth calls the religion of the woods. This is strictly applicable to
`Thanatopsis' and `Forest Hymn;' but Washington Irving is so far right that Bryant's grand merit
is his nationality and his power of painting the American landscape, especially in its wild,
solitary and magnificent forms. His diction is pure and lucid, with scarcely a flaw, and he is
master of blank verse."

We cannot close this sketch better than by showing the poet's devotion to his country in his own
words: "We are not without the hope that those who read what we have written, will see in the
past, with all its vicissitudes, the promise of a prosperous and honorable future, of concord at
home, and peace and respect abroad; and that the same cheerful piety which leads the good man
to put his personal trust in a kind Providence, will prompt the good citizen to cherish an equal
confidence in regard to the destiny reserved for our beloved country."

Thanatopsis

TO him who in the love of Nature holds

Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;--
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around--
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air--
Comes a still voice--Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place

Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificient. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings,
The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,--the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods--rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadow green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,--
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.--Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings--yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep--the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,
The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man--
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side
By those, who in their turn shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like a quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

William Cullen Bryant

To a Waterfowl

WHITHER, midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong
As, darkly seen against the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.

Seek'st thou the plashy brink

Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sing
On the chafed ocean side?

There is a Power whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast--
The desert and illimitable air--
Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned,

At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end;

Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend,
Soon, o'er thy sheltered nest.

Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven

Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart
Deeply has sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

William Cullen Bryant

To the Fringed Gentian

THOU blossom bright with autumn dew,

And colored with the heaven's own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night.

Thou comest not when violets lean

O'er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o'er the ground-bird's hidden nest.

Thou waitest late and com'st alone,

When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end.

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye

Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue--blue--as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.

I would that thus, when I shall see

The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.

William Cullen Bryant

June

I GAZED upon the glorious sky

And the green mountains round,
And thought that when I came to lie
At rest within the ground,
"Twere pleasant, that in flowery June,
When brooks send up a cheerful tune,
And groves a joyous sound,
The sexton's hand, my grave to make,
The rich, green mountain-turf should break.

A cell within the frozen mould,

A coffin borne through sleet,
And icy clods above it rolled,
While fierce the tempests beat--
Away!--I will not think of these--
Blue be the sky and soft the breeze,
Earth green beneath the feet,
And be the damp mould gently pressed
Into my narrow place of rest.

There through the long, long summer hours,

The golden light should lie,
And thick young herbs and groups of flowers
Stand in their beauty by.
The oriole should build and tell
His love-tale close beside my cell;
The idle butterfly
Should rest him there, and there be heard
The housewife bee and humming-bird.

And what if cheerful shouts at noon

Come, from the village sent,
Or songs of maids, beneath the moon
With fairy laughter blent?
And what if, in the evening light,
Betrothed lovers walk in sight
Of my low monument?
I would the lovely scene around
Might know no sadder sight nor sound.

I know that I no more should see

The season's glorious show,
Nor would its brightness shine for me,
Nor its wild music flow;
But if, around my place of sleep,
The friends I love should come to weep,
They might not haste to go.
Soft airs, and song, and light, and bloom
Should keep them lingering by my tomb.

These to their softened hearts should bear

The thought of what has been,
And speak of one who cannot share
The gladness of the scene;
Whose part, in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the summer hills,
Is that his grave is green;
And deeply would their hearts rejoice
To hear again his living voice.

William Cullen Bryant

Note: Bryant died and was buried in the month of June. -- John McDonnell

A Forest Hymn

THE groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned

To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave,
And spread the roof above them,---ere he framed
The lofty vault, to gather and roll back
The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,
Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks
And supplication. For his simple heart
Might not resist the sacred influences,
Which, from the stilly twilight of the place,
And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven
Mingled their mossy boughs, and from the sound
Of the invisible breath that swayed at once
All their green tops, stole over him, and bowed
His spirit with the thought of boundless power
And inaccessible majesty. Ah, why
Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect
God's ancient sanctuaries, and adore
Only among the crowd, and under roofs,
That our frail hands have raised? Let me, at least,
Here, in the shadow of this aged wood,
Offer one hymn---thrice happy, if it find
Acceptance in His ear.
Father, thy hand
Hath reared these venerable columns, thou
Didst weave this verdant roof. Thou didst look down
Upon the naked earth, and, forthwith, rose
All these fair ranks of trees. They, in thy sun,
Budded, and shook their green leaves in the breeze,
And shot towards heaven. The century-living crow,
Whose birth was in their tops, grew old and died
Among their branches, till, at last, they stood,
As now they stand, massy, and tall, and dark,
Fit shrine for humble worshipper to hold
Communion with his Maker. These dim vaults,
These winding aisles, of human pomp and pride
Report not. No fantastic carvings show
The boast of our vain race to change the form
Of thy fair works. But thou art here---thou fill'st
The solitude. Thou art in the soft winds
That run along the summit of these trees
In music; thou art in the cooler breath
That from the inmost darkness of the place
Comes, scarcely felt; the barky trunks, the ground,
The fresh moist ground, are all instinct with thee.
Here is continual worship;---Nature, here,
In the tranquility that thou dost love,
Enjoys thy presence. Noiselessly, around,
From perch to perch, the solitary bird
Passes; and yon clear spring, that, midst its herbs,
Wells softly forth and wandering steeps the roots
Of half the mighty forest, tells no tale
Of all the good it does. Thou hast not left
Thyself without a witness, in these shades,
Of thy perfections. Grandeur, strength, and grace
Are here to speak of thee. This mighty oak---
By whose immovable stem I stand and seem
Almost annihilated---not a prince,
In all that proud old world beyond the deep,
E'er wore his crown as lofty as he
Wears the green coronal of leaves with which
Thy hand has graced him. Nestled at his root
Is beauty, such as blooms not in the glare
Of the broad sun. That delicate forest flower
With scented breath, and look so like a smile,
Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould,
An emanation of the indwelling Life,
A visible token of the upholding Love,
That are the soul of this wide universe.

My heart is awed within me when I think

Of the great miracle that still goes on,
In silence, round me---the perpetual work
Of thy creation, finished, yet renewed
Forever. Written on thy works I read
The lesson of thy own eternity.
Lo! all grow old and die---but see again,
How on the faltering footsteps of decay
Youth presses----ever gay and beautiful youth
In all its beautiful forms. These lofty trees
Wave not less proudly that their ancestors
Moulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost
One of earth's charms: upon her bosom yet,
After the flight of untold centuries,
The freshness of her far beginning lies
And yet shall lie. Life mocks the idle hate
Of his arch enemy Death---yea, seats himself
Upon the tyrant's throne---the sepulchre,
And of the triumphs of his ghastly foe
Makes his own nourishment. For he came forth
From thine own bosom, and shall have no end.

There have been holy men who hid themselves

Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave
Their lives to thought and prayer, till they outlived
The generation born with them, nor seemed
Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks
Around them;---and there have been holy men
Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus.
But let me often to these solitudes
Retire, and in thy presence reassure
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies,
The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink
And tremble and are still. Oh, God! when thou
Dost scare the world with falling thunderbolts, or fill,
With all the waters of the firmament,
The swift dark whirlwind that uproots the woods
And drowns the village; when, at thy call,
Uprises the great deep and throws himself
Upon the continent, and overwhelms
Its cities---who forgets not, at the sight
Of these tremendous tokens of thy power,
His pride, and lays his strifes and follies by?
Oh, from these sterner aspects of thy face
Spare me and mine, nor let us need the wrath
Of the mad unchained elements to teach
Who rules them. Be it ours to meditate,
In these calm shades, thy milder majesty,
And to the beautiful order of the works
Learn to conform the order of our lives.

William Cullen Bryant

Bryant has been criticized as having been focused too much on death. These two poems by
Bryant, "Consumption" and "The Death of the Flowers", are examples of that focus. And it didn't
help matters when these two poems were praised by Poe, the Master of the Morbid. Yet Poe was
right to praise them. They are beautiful and moving works. --John McDonnell

Consumption
Ay, thou art for the grave; thy glances shine
Too brightly to shine long; another Spring
Shall deck her for men's eyes---but not for thine---
Sealed in a sleep which knows no wakening.
The fields for thee have no medicinal leaf,
And the vexed ore no mineral of power;
And they who love thee wait in anxious grief
Till the slow plague shall bring the final hour.
Glide softly to thy rest then; Death should come
Gently, to one of gentle mould like thee,
As light winds wandering through groves of bloom
Detach the delicate blossom from the tree.
Close thy sweet eyes, calmly, and without pain;
And we will trust in God to see thee yet again.

William Cullen Bryant

The Death of the Flowers

THE melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,

Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread;
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.

Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood
In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.

The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,

And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hills the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.

And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,

The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side.
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forests cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.

William Cullen Bryant

The Death of Lincoln

OH, slow to smit and swift to spare,

Gentle and merciful and just!
Who, in the fear of God, didst bear
The sword of power, a nation's trust!

In sorrow by thy bier we stand,

Amid the awe that hushes all,
And speak the anguish of a land
That shook with horror at thy fall.

Thy task is done; the bond of free;

We bear thee to an honored grave,
Whose proudest monument shall be
The broken fetters of the slave.

Pure was thy life; its bloddy close

Hath placed thee with the sons of light,
Among the noble host of those
Who perished in the cause of Right

William Cullen Bryant

The Strange Lady

THE summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by,
As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool dear sky;
Young Albert, in the forest's edge, has heard a rustling sound
An arrow slightly strikes his hand and falls upon the ground.

A lovely woman from the wood comes suddenly in sight;

Her merry eye is full and black, her cheek is brown and bright;
She wears a tunic of the blue, her belt with beads is strung,
And yet she speaks in gentle tones, and in the English tongue.

"It was an idle bolt I sent, against the villain crow;

Fair sir, I fear it harmed thy hand; beshrew my erring bow!"
"Ah! would that bolt had not been spent, then, lady, might I wear
A lasting token on my hand of one so passing fair!"

"Thou art a flatterer like the rest, but wouldst thou take with me
A day of hunting in the wilds, beneath the greenwood tree,
I know where most the pheasants feed, and where the red-deer herd,
And thou shouldst chase the nobler game, and I bring down the bird."

Now Albert in her quiver lays the arrow in its place,

And wonders as he gazes on the beauty of her face:
`Those hunting-grounds are far away, and, lady, 'twere not meet
That night, amid the wilderness, should overtake thy feet."

"Heed not the night, a summer lodge amid the wild is mine,
'Tis shadowed by the tulip-tree, 'tis mantled by the vine;
The wild plum sheds its yellow fruit from fragrant thickets nigh,
And flowery prairies from the door stretch till they meet the sky.

"There in the boughs that hide the roof the mock-bird sits and sings,
And there the hang-bird's brood within its little hammock swings;
A pebbly brook, where rustling winds among the hopples sweep,
Shall lull thee till the morning sun looks in upon thy sleep."

Away, into the forest depths by pleasant paths they go,

He with his rifle on his arm, the lady with her bow,
Where cornels arch their cool dark boughs o'er beds of wintergreen,
And never at his father's door again was Albert seen.

That night upon the woods came down a furious hurricane,

With howl of winds and roar of streams and beating of the rain;
The mighty thunder broke and drowned the noises in its crash;
The old trees seemed to fight like fiends beneath the lightning-flash.

Next day, within a mossy glen, mid mouldering trunks were found
The fragments of a human form, upon the bloody ground;
White bones from which the flesh was torn, and locks of glossy hair;
They laid them in the place of graves, yet wist not whose they were.
And whether famished evening wolves had mangled Albert so,
Or that strange dame so gay and fair were some mysterious foe,
Or whether to that forest lodge, beyond the mountains blue,
He went to dwell with her, the friends who mourned him never knew.

William Cullen Bryant

The Skies

AY! gloriously thou standest there,

Beautiful, boundless firmament!
That swelling wide o'er earth and air,
And round the horizon bent,
With thy bright vault, and sapphire wall,
Dost overhang and circle all.

Far, far below thee, tall old trees

Arise, and piles built up of old,
And hills, whose ancient summits freeze,
In the fierce light and cold.
The eagle soars his utmost height,
Yet far thou stretchest o'er his flight.

Thou hast thy frowns--with thee on high,

The storm has made his airy seat,
Beyond that soft blue curtain lie
His stores of hail and sleet.
Thence the consuming lightnings break.
There the strong hurricanes awake.

Yet art thou prodigal of smiles--

Smiles, sweeter than thy frowns are stem:
Earth sends, from all her thousand isles,
A shout at thy return.
The glory that comes down from thee,
Bathes, in deep joy, the land and sea.

The sun, the gorgeous sun, is thine,

The pomp that brings and shuts the day,
The clouds that round him change and shine,
The airs that fan his way.
Thence look the thoughtful stars, and there
The meek moon walks the silent air.

The sunny Italy may boast

The beauteous tints that flush her skies.
And lovely, round the Grecian coast,
May thy blue pillars rise.
I only know how fair they stand,
Around my own beloved land.

And they are fair--a charm is theirs,

That earth, the proud green earth, has not--
With all the forms, and hues, and airs,
That haunt her sweetest spot.
We gaze upon thy calm pure sphere,
And read of Heaven's eternal year.

Oh, when, amid the throng of men,

The heart grows sick of hollow mirth,
How willingly we turn us then
Away from this cold earth,
And look into thy azure breast,
For seats of innocence and rest.

William Cullen Bryant

October

AY, thou art welcome, heaven's delicious breath!

When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf,
And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
Wind of the sunny south! oh, still delay
In the gay woods and in the golden air,
Like to a good old age released from care,
Journeying, in long serenity, away.
In such a bright, late quiet, would that I
Might wear out life like thee, 'mid bowers and brooks
And dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,
And music of kind voices ever nigh;
And when my last sand twinkled in the glass,
Pass silently from men, as thou dost pass.

William Cullen Bryant

November

YET one smile more, departing, distant sun!

One mellow smile through the soft vapoury air,
Ere, o'er the frozen earth, the loud winds ran,
Or snows are sifted o'er the meadows bare.
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,
And the blue Gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee
Shall murmur by the hedge that skim the way,
The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,
And man delight to linger in thy ray.
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.

William Cullen Bryant

The Gladness of Nature

IS this a time to be cloudy and sad,

When our mother Nature laughs around;
When even the deep blue heavens look glad,
And gladness breathes from the blossoming ground?

There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren,

And the gossip of swallows through all the sky;
The ground-squirrel gaily chirps by his den,
And the wilding bee hums merrily by.

The clouds are at play in the azure space,

And their shadows at play on the bright green vale,
And here they stretch to the frolic chase,
And there they roll on the easy gale.

There's a dance of leaves in that aspen bower,

There's a titter of winds in that beechen tree,
There's a smile on the fruit, and a smile on the flower,
And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea.

And look at the broad-faced sun, how he smiles

On the dewy earth that smiles in his ray,
On the leaping waters and gay young isles;
Ay, look, and he'll smile thy gloom away.

William Cullen Bryant

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The”Published 1798
Outline
About the Author; Overview; Setting; Themes and Characters; Literary Technique; Topics for
Discussion; Questions; Related Titles

I About the Author

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in the small, rural Devonshire town of Ottery St Mary in
south-west England on October 21, 1772. The son of a Church of England parish vicar, John
Coleridge, and Ann Bowdon Coleridge, the boy entered Dame Key's Reading School in 1775. In
1778 he began studies at the Henry VIII Free Grammar School, which was headed by his father.
When John Coleridge died in 1782, Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital School in London. The
youngster was considered dreamy and eccentric by fellow schoolboys, in part because of his
enthusiastic interest in metaphysics. He was considered extremely precocious.

In 1791 Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge, but in spite of his scholastic abilities and
outstanding intellect, he did not find the experience stimulating and left the university in 1794
without graduating.

On a visit to Oxford in June of that same year, he met Robert Southey, a student there. The two
young men had several things in common, including poetic aspirations, radical political and
religious views, and sympathy for the principles of the ongoing French Revolution. Coleridge
and Southey determined to emigrate to Pennsylvania to establish a 'Pantisocracy', a term devised
by Coleridge to describe an ideal democratic community in which there would be equal rule by
all. The scheme required the would-be immigrants to marry and Coleridge duly became engaged
to Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey's fiancée. Although the Pantisocracy plan was never
realized, in 1795 Coleridge went through with the marriage.

In 1796 Coleridge published his first collection of poems, Poems on Various Subjects. In
addition, he served as the editor of The Watchman for a couple of weeks, championing the ideals
of the French Revolution and of the English political thinker William Godwin.

Coleridge moved to Nether Stowey in Somerset in 1797. This was a fortunate event because
William Wordsworth, the 'best poet of the age', and his sister Dorothy settled at nearby Alfoxden
House the same year. Coleridge and Wordsworth, who had met casually two years earlier, now
developed an intimate friendship. They collaborated on a collection of poetry and jointly
published Lyrical Ballads in 1798. This collection included Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner'. A second edition, published in 1802, featured Wordsworth's preface, which described
the writers' poetic theory. Scholars consider the publication of Lyrical Ballads to mark the
beginning of the English Romantic Period and, indeed, it is one of the most significant volumes
in English literary history.

Over the next couple of years, Coleridge's health deteriorated. To dull the pain, doctors provided
him with heavy dosages of laudanum, a narcotic. It is suggested that he may have become
addicted to this drug; in any case he fell into a deep depression. In 1802 Coleridge published
'Dejection: An Ode', a poem of despair in which he laments the loss of his health, happiness, and
poetic powers. In spite of its bleak outlook, many scholars consider this ode to be Coleridge's
most magnificent lyrical work.

In 1803 the poet travelled in Scotland with the Wordsworths. In 1804 he visited Malta in the
hope of improving his health. While there, Coleridge served as secretary to Governor Sir
Alexander Ball. However after two years, he felt that his health was completely broken and he
returned to England. That same year he separated from Sara and their children. One of the lowest
points in the poet's life came in 1810, when he quarrelled with Wordsworth and the two men
became estranged for two years, although eventually they reconciled their differences.

In 1816 Coleridge took up residence with a physician, James Gilman, at Highgate, in the
northern suburbs of London. Coleridge apparently prospered under Gilman's care, and he entered
his most sustained period of literary activity, which lasted until 1819. While continuing to lecture
and write for newspapers, Coleridge published Biographia Literaria (1817), a brilliant volume of
philosophical and literary observations. This volume included his account of the conception of
Lyrical Ballads, his insightful examination of Wordsworth's poetry, and his statement of the
concept of 'willing suspension of disbelief'.

The final years of Coleridge's life were relatively tranquil. In 1825 he was named an associate of
the Royal Society of Literature, and he and Wordsworth toured the Rhineland in 1828. His most
pleasurable pursuit during this time may have been entertaining guests in his home. William
Hazlitt, in My First Acquaintance with Poets, reported on Coleridge's habit of dazzling visitors
with his observations on literature and philosophy. He became known as the 'Sage of Highgate',
and his home was the meeting place for the London literati. Coleridge died in Highgate on July
25, 1834.

II Overview

On a superficial level, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' can be read as a tale of horror in which
a mariner is hounded by disaster and supernatural forces after murdering an albatross. However,
the poem is much more than that. Coleridge clearly tries to make the supernatural elements of the
poem appear as integral parts of the natural world. His underlying theme is that all things that
inhabit the natural world have an inherent value and beauty, and that it is necessary for humanity
to recognize and respect these qualities. The simple action of the plot, initiated by the mariner's
unthinking, destructive act, leads to his tribulations and consequent progress to maturity. 'The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is an excellent example of Romantic poetry and is often read to
understand the characteristics of this poetic genre.

III Setting

There are two settings in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. In the first scene an ancient mariner
stops a guest at a wedding party and begins to tell his tale. The mariner's words then transport the
reader on a long ocean voyage, returning to the wedding at the end of the poem. The story is
probably set in the late medieval period; the town in which the action occurs is never named,
although it is likely that Coleridge's audience would have pictured a British seaport, possibly
London.

The mariner describes a voyage he took as a youth from an unnamed European country to the
South Pole and back. The initial descriptions of the ship and its crew are fairly realistic, but as
the ancient mariner undergoes his quest for understanding and redemption, the supernatural
world increasingly engulfs him. His world becomes nightmarish when contrasted with the
realistic world that he has left behind. At the same time, in the background, elements from the
natural world are always present. For much of the poem, the mariner is adrift in the middle of the
ocean, symbolically cut off from all human companionship.

IV Themes and Characters

There are several secondary themes in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', relating to Christianity
and the supernatural, and two primary themes. The first primary theme concerns the potential
consequences of a single unthinking act. When the mariner shoots an albatross, he does it
casually and without animosity. Yet this impulsive, destructive act is his undoing. Similar to
other Romantics, Coleridge believed that the seeds of destruction and creation are contained each
within the other. One cannot create something without destroying something else. Likewise,
destruction leads to the creation of something new. The loss of the mariner's ship, shipmates, and
his own former self ultimately leads to the regeneration of the mariner.

This process of destruction and regeneration introduces the poem's second main theme. The
mariner gradually comes to realize the enormous consequences of his casual act, even as he
struggles to accept responsibility for it. To do this he must comprehend that all things in nature
are of equal value. Everything, as a part of nature, has its own beauty and is to be cherished for
its own sake.

This realization is suddenly apparent when the mariner spontaneously recognizes the beauty of
the sea snakes; his heart fills with love for them, and he can bless them 'unaware'. The moral of
the tale is manifest in the ancient mariner's final words to the wedding guest: 'He prayeth best,
who loveth best/ All things both great and small;/ For the dear God who loveth us,/ He made and
loveth all.'

Coleridge focuses in the poem on humanity's relationship to the natural world. It is clear that the
killing of the albatross brings dire consequences on the mariner. In a larger sense, it is not his
killing of the bird that is wrong, but the mariner's—and by extension humankind's—callous and
destructive relationship with nature that is in error. Coleridge intends to confront this relationship
and place it in a larger philosophical context. If the reader grasps the lesson that the ancient
mariner learns from his experience, then there are social implications.

Although the mariner's killing of the albatross, the terrifying deaths of his shipmates, and the
grotesque descriptions of supernatural spirits are disturbing, these elements are intended to
develop the story, to illustrate how the mariner's destructive act sets him apart, and to portray
vividly the results of his act and the horrifying, repulsive world that he comes to inhabit because
of it. The consequences are all the more terrible for having been set in motion by such a
thoughtless act in the first place. Coleridge is working towards a goal—to portray the mariner's
development into a sensitive, understanding, and compassionate human being. In so doing, he
aims to persuade the reader to reconsider his or her attitudes towards the natural world.

Part of Coleridge's technique is to personify aspects of nature as supernatural spirits, yet he does
not on any level develop an argument for pantheism (the belief that God and the material world
are one and the same and that God is present in everything). A great deal of Christian symbolism
and some allegory are present—particularly at the end of Part 4, where connections are made
between suffering, repentance, redemption, and penance. These elements combine to form a rich
texture of both natural and religious symbolism that can be profoundly moving.
The major character in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is the mariner who relates his chilling
experiences. It is he who kills the albatross, suffers the consequences, learns from his sufferings,
and earns his redemption. As part of his penance, he spends his life telling his tale to others as a
warning and a lesson. At first sight, the mariner appears terrifying in looks and manner, but he is
so intense that the wedding guest is compelled to listen. As the tale unfolds, the wedding guest's
reactions to the mariner change from scorn to sympathy, and finally even to pity. The wedding
guest serves as a plot device to frame and advance the story, but he also undergoes a
transformation of his own. Startled by the mariner who accosts him, the wedding guest first
appears as a devil-may-care gallant. However, by the time he has heard the mariner's dreadful
tale, he has become thoughtful and subdued.

The mariner's shipmates are innocent victims of his rash act. Like the members of the wedding
party, the sailors are purposefully kept vague and undeveloped, since Coleridge's intent is that
the audience focuses its full attention on the plight of the mariner.

Supernatural beings appear in the poem as symbolic or allegorical figures, representing the
forces of nature, life, death, and retribution. The mariner confronts these figures and must
ultimately appease them in order to obtain his salvation.

V Literary Technique

In developing his themes in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', Coleridge masterfully expresses
various concepts through the use of symbols and imagery. Much of the imagery is breathtaking,
and the poet's intense descriptions leave a lasting imprint on the reader. This skilful combination
of intellectual content and vivid descriptions is not only aesthetically appealing, but also
emotionally affecting.

When Coleridge and Wordsworth developed the poetic theory that underlies Lyrical Ballads,
they decided to use ordinary speech in their verses—what Wordsworth called 'the language of
real life'. Embracing colloquial language was part of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's general break
with neoclassical philosophies and traditions, which emphasized logic, structure, and formality.
Wordsworth and Coleridge incorporated ballad forms, themes, and characters, and proposed to
write poems about simple, natural characters.

In place of an overwhelming emphasis on society—as characterized by the poetry of Alexander

Pope—Wordsworth and Coleridge wanted to highlight the importance of the individual. They
emphasized human emotions, and stressed the concept that imagination and creativity are forces
within the individual that respond to the natural world.

A lyric is typically a short poem that expresses the speaker's thoughts and emotions; a ballad is a
dramatic narrative, a poem that tells a story. Lyrical Ballads, therefore, was an attempt by
Coleridge and Wordsworth to bring together two poetic genres that previously had been seen as
mutually exclusive. Where the two poets were innovative was in their attempt to develop a new
poetry to encompass the new realities that they perceived in the world about them.

VI Topics for Discussion

A wedding guest who does not know the mariner is forced to listen to his tale. Why does
Coleridge employ this device? Is the guest meant to guide the reader's response to the mariner's
tale?

A wedding is a social celebration of the natural order and of new beginnings. Why is it
significant that the mariner tells his story to a wedding guest? Would the moral of the story be
changed if the mariner had told his tale to the groom or bride?

In later versions of the poem, Coleridge removed many archaic words and spellings that had
appeared in the original version. Among his revisions was the addition of the epigraph and the
marginal glosses. How important are the glosses to your understanding of the poem? Does this
suggest that Coleridge was successful or unsuccessful in conveying his meaning poetically?

Many Romantics believed that a writer could only write when inspired to do so. What do
Coleridge's revisions of the poem indicate about the importance of editing in the writing process?

Why does the mariner kill the albatross? Is his action a typically human response or trait? Why
does Coleridge spend comparatively little time describing the incident?

What is the significance of the albatross being hung around the mariner's neck?

The ancient mariner's shipmates all die unpleasant deaths. Is it fair that they should suffer
because of his actions?

At the beginning of Part 4, the wedding guest interrupts the mariner's story to express his fears.
Why does Coleridge not have the mariner tell his tale straight through?

What is the importance of the line, 'I looked to heaven, and tried to pray' (1. 244)?

Discuss the meaning and importance of the last eight lines. Is there a moral to the poem? Where
is it explicitly stated?

VII Questions

Symbols are important in the poem. Traditionally, snakes have represented both good (as in the
symbol for the medical profession, where they represent healing powers) and evil (as with the
serpent in the Garden of Eden). What other examples are there of the symbolic use of snakes?
Explain why Coleridge involved a water snake in the poem's climax.

In literature and folklore the human eye is typically considered a mirror of the soul. Discuss
Coleridge's use of this tradition, examining each of the incidents in which eyes are mentioned in
the poem (including lines 3, 12, 139, 144, 215, 228, 251, 255, 260, 332, 416, 436, 440, 485, 560,
567, and 618).

In terms of the poem's theme, compare 'The very deep did rot: O Christ!/ That ever this should
be!/ Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs/ Upon the slimy sea' (11. 123-126) with 'O happy
living things! no tongue/ Their beauty might declare' (11. 282-283). Consider the idea of the
appreciation of life and the fact that 'a spring of love gushed' from the mariner's heart as he
blessed the snakes 'unaware'. He had killed the albatross in a thoughtless moment; why is it
important that he bless the snakes unthinkingly?
Discuss Coleridge's use of imagery in the poem, citing examples to verify your points.

Discuss the use of Christian elements in the poem.

How does Coleridge incorporate supernatural elements into the poem? What is the function of
these elements? How do the supernatural elements relate to the natural elements?

Do you think that Coleridge succeeds in using simple, colloquial language in the poem? Be sure
to consider the impact of the ballad form and rhyme scheme on the narrative style.

Read the statements of purpose in Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads and in Chapter 14 of
Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Determine how well 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' meets
the poets' intended goals and utilizes their stated methods of expression.

VIII Related Titles

'Kubla Khan' is frequently read in schools as a companion piece to 'The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner'. The two poems are different in that 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is a finished
narrative, whereas the incomplete 'Kubla Khan' is best described as a lyrical mood poem. Both of
the poems are Romantic in conception, presenting foreign locales and dealing with the past. Each
is expressed in 'natural' language and is concerned with mystical and supernatural events.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | Part The First.

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

"The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,

And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din."

He holds him with his skinny hand,

"There was a ship," quoth he.
"Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

He holds him with his glittering eye--

The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years child:
The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:

He cannot chuse but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,

Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the light-house top.

The Sun came up upon the left,

Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.

Higher and higher every day,

Till over the mast at noon--
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.

The bride hath paced into the hall,

Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,

Yet he cannot chuse but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he

Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,

As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow,

And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.

And through the drifts the snowy clifts

Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--
The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

At length did cross an Albatross:

Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.

It ate the food it ne'er had eat,

And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!

And a good south wind sprung up behind;

The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariners' hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,

It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.

"God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!--
Why look'st thou so?"--With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.

Coleridge
Frost at Midnight

First published 1798; final version (below) 1829

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud--and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage,1 all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits 5
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, 10
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film,2 which fluttered on the grate, 15
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit 20
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
 But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, 25
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, 30
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! 35
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, 40
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, 45
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, 50
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 55
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God 60
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, 65

Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall 70
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

February, 1798

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872. His mother, Matilda
Dunbar, was a former slave with a love for poetry. His father, Joshua Dunbar, was a civil war
veteran who had served in the 55th Massachusetts Volunteers, a famous regiment whose ranks
were composed of African-Americans. His parents divorced in 1874 and his mother worked long
hours to support her family.

Paul Laurence Dunbar published his first poems in school newspapers while attending Dayton’s
Central High School. Orville Wright was a classmate. After his graduation in 1891, the only
work he could find was as an elevator operator in Dayton’s Callahan Building. Many
monotonous hours moving between floors allowed Dunbar’s poetic creativity to flourish.

Throughout 1891 and 1892, Dunbar submitted his elevator poems for publication in newspapers
and popular magazines with limited success. His first anthology, Oak and Ivy was printed in
1893 at his own expense. This small volume of poetry recovered his investment of $125, but by
the end of 1893, the young poet was financially despondent.

Dunbar left Dayton in 1893 and moved to Chicago. He met abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who
employed him at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Within a few months he returned to Dayton
and his position of elevator operator.

When at his lowest, Dunbar was befriended by Dr. Henry Archibald Tobey, the distinguished
superintendent of the Toledo State Hospital for the Insane. Dr. Tobey became Dunbar’s greatest
patron, more than once loaning the struggling poet substantial sums of money. Over the years,
Dunbar was able to repay his benefactor, and also present to his friend a signed, inscribed copy
of each of his increasingly popular works.

Dr. Tobey paid the printing costs for the private publication of Dunbar’s second collection of
poems, Majors and Minors, in 1895. The young poet’s second anthology contained some of his
best work from Oak and Ivy, together with original poems demonstrating a new maturity. A
small section of Majors and Minors (the “Minors” essentially) featured humorous poems in
Kentucky black dialect, a voice which the author would find increasingly inescapable. Majors
and Minors contained many of Dunbar’s most enduring poems. Dr. Tobey circulated copies of
the book among his friends who included the playwright James A. Herne. In turn, Herne sent a
copy to an acquaintance, William Dean Howells.

On June 27, 1896, William Dean Howells, the nation’s most prominent literary critic, published
a glowing one page review of Majors and Minors in Harper’s Weekly. By coincidence, the issue
reported on the nomination of William McKinley for the presidency and consequently had a
tremendous circulation. Dunbar, it was said, went to bed destitute and woke up on the morning
of his twenty-fourth birthday as one of the most famous living Americans of African descent.

In 1897 Dunbar spent six months in England, touring and making personal appearances with the
hope of furthering his career. The trip was not very successful financially, forcing him to return
to the United States. Shortly after his return Dunbar was hired by the Library of Congress with
the assistance of Robert Ingersoll, an orator and political speechmaker. In March of 1898, he
married Alice Ruth Moore, a poet and school teacher. The marriage only lasted four years. After
separating from Alice in 1902, Dunbar returned to Dayton. He died on February 9, 1906, at the
age of 33 from tuberculosis.

In 1975, Dr. Tobey’s grandson, Mr. William Shepard of Dayton, presented Tobey’s nearly
complete, inscribed collection of Dunbar’s first editions to the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library at
Wright State University. It is one of the most significant collections of Dunbar’s work in
existence.

Absence

Goodnight, my love, for I have dreamed

of thee
In waking dreams, until my soul is lost—
Is lost in passion’s wide and shoreless sea,
Where, like a ship, unruddered, it is tost
Hither and thither at the wild waves’ will.
There is no potent Master’s voice to still
This newer, more tempestuous Galilee!

The stormy petrels of my fancy fly

In warning course cross the darkening green,
And, like a frightened bird, my heart doth cry
And seek to find some rock of rest between
The threatening sky and the restless wave.
It is not length of life that grief doth crave,
But only calm and peace in which to die.

Here let me rest upon this single hope,

For oh, my wings are weary of the wind,
And with its stress no more may strive or cope.
One cry has dulled mine ears, mine eyes are
blind,-
Would that o’er all intervening space,
I might fly forth and see thee face to face.
I fly; I search, but, love, in gloom I grope.

Fly home, far bird, unto thy waiting nest;

Spread thy strong wings above wind-swept
sea.
Beat the grim breeze with thy unruffled breast
Until thou sittest wing to wing with me.
Then, let the past bring up its tales of wrong;
We shall chant low our sweet connubial song,
Till storm and doubt and past no more shall be!

Lullaby.

Sing me, sweet, a soothing psalm,

Holy, tender, low, and calm,
Full of drowsy words and dreamy,
Sleep half seen where the sides are seamy;
Lay my head upon your breast;
Sing me to rest.

Temptation

I done got ‘uligion, honey, an’ I’s happy ez

a king;
Evahthing I see erbout me ‘s jes’ lak sunshine
in de spring;
An’ it seems lak I do’ want to do anothah blessid
thing
But jes’ run an’ tell de neighbors, an’ to shout
an’ pray an’ sing.

I done shuk my fis’ at Satan, an’ I’s gin de worl’

my back;
I do’ want no hendrin’ causes now a-both’rin’
in my track;
Fu’ I’s on my way to glory, an’ I feels too sho’
to miss.
W’y, dey ain’t no use in sinnin’ when ‘uligion ‘s
sweet ez dis.

Talk erbout a man backslidin’ w’en he’s on de

gospel way;
No, suh, I done beat de debbil, an’ Temptation’s
los’ de day.
Gwine to keep my eyes right straight up, gwine
to shet my eahs, an’ see
Whut ole projick Mistah Satan’s gwineto try to
wuk on me.

Listen, whut dat soun’ I hyeah dah? ‘tain’t no

one commence to sing;
It’s a fiddle; git erway dah! don’ you hyeah
dat blessid thing?
W’y, dat’s sweet ez drippin’ honey, ‘cause, you
knows, I draws de bow,
An’ when music’s sho’ ‘nough music, I’s de one
dat’s sho’ to know.
W’y, I’s done de double shuffle, twell a bbody
could n’t res’,
Jes’ a-hyeahin’ Sam de fiddlah play dat chune
his level bes’;
I could cut a mighty caper, I could gin a mighty
fling
Jes’ right now, I’s mo’ dan suttain I could cut
de pigeon wing.

Look hyeah, whut’s dis I’s been sayin’? whut

on urf’s tuk holt o’ me?
Dat ole music come nigh runnin’ my ‘uligion up
a tree!
Cleak out wif dat dah ole fiddle, don’ you try
dat trick agin;
Did n’t think I could be tempted, but you lak to
made me sin!

Ballad.

I KNOW my love is true,

And oh the day is fair.
The sky is clear and blue,
The flowers are rich of hue,
The air I breathe is rare,
I have no grief or care;
For my own love is true,
And oh the day is fair.

My love is false I find,

And oh the day is dark.
Blows sadly down the wind,
While sorrow holds my mind;
I do not hear the lark,
For quenched is life's dear spark,--
My love is false I find,
And oh the day is dark!

For love doth make the day

Or dark or doubly bright;
Her beams along the way
Dispel the gloom and gray.
She lives and all is bright,
She dies and life is night.
For love doth make the day,
Or dark or doubly bright.
 The Poet and His Song.

A SONG is but a little thing,

And yet what joy it is to sing!
In hours of toil it gives me zest,
And when at eve I long for rest;
When cows come home along the bars,
And in the fold I hear the bell,
As Night, the shepherd, herds his stars,
I sing my song, and all is well.

There are no ears to hear my lays,

No lips to lift a word of praise;
But still, with faith unfaltering,
I live and laugh and love and sing.
What matters yon unheeding throng?
They cannot feel my spirit's spell,
Since life is sweet and love is long,
I sing my song, and all is well.

My days are never days of ease;

I till my ground and prune my trees.
When ripened gold is all the plain,
I put my sickle to the grain.
I labor hard, and toil and sweat,
While others dream within the dell;
But even while my brow is wet,
I sing my song, and all is well.

Sometimes the sun, unkindly hot,

My garden makes a desert spot;
Sometimes a blight upon the tree
Takes all my fruit away from me;
And then with throes of bitter pain
Rebellious passions rise and swell;
But--life is more than fruit or grain,
And so I sing, and all is well.