The same refined and exalted spirit reveals itself in Mr. Dett’s verse as in his music. Having this combination of gifts, he cannot but raise the highest expectations. I present in this place a poem in blank verse of nobly contemplative mood, suggesting far more, as the best poems do, than it says:
AT NIAGARA
—No, no! Not tonight, my Friend,
I may not, cannot go with you tonight.
And think not that I love you any less
Because this now I’d rather be alone.
My heart is strangely torn; unwonted thoughts
Have so infused themselves into my mind
That altogether there is wrought in me
A sort of hapless mood, whose phantom power
Born perhaps of my own fantasies
Has ta’en me. By its subtle spell
I’m wooed and changed from what’s my natural self.
I am so possessed I can but wish
For nothing else save this and solitude.
If in companionship I sought relief
Yours indeed would be the first I’d seek.
There is none other whom I so esteem,
None who quite so perfect understands.
Your presence always is a soothing balm,
—Ne’er failing me when troubled. But tonight,
Forgive me, Friend—I’d rather be alone.
Leave me, let me with myself commune.
Presently if no change come, I shall go
Stand in the shadowed gorge, or where the moon
Throws her silver on the rippling stream,
List to the sounding cataract’s thundering fall,
Or hark to spirit voices in the wind.
For methinks sometimes that these strange moods
Are heaven-sent us by the jealous God
Who’d thus remind us that no human love
Can fully satisfy the longing heart:
Perhaps an intimation sent to souls
That he would speak somewhat, or nearer draw.
Therefore I’ll to Him. Talking waters, stars,
The moon and whispering trees shall make me wise
In what it is He’d have my spirit know.
And Nature singing from the earth and sky
Shall fill me with such peace, that in the morn
I’ll be the gay glad self you’ve always known.
Urge me no further, now you understand.
A nobler friend than you none ever knew—
But not this time. Tonight I’ll be alone;
And if from moonlit valley God should speak,
Or in the tumbling waters sound a call,
Or whisper in the sighing of the wind,
He’ll find me with an undivided heart
Patient waiting to hear; but Friend,—alone.
CHAPTER VI
DIALECT VERSE
The reader of these pages may ask: “But where is the Negro’s humorous verse? Here is the pathos, where is the comedy of Negro life?” It may also be asked where the dialect verse is, and the dramatic narratives and character pieces that made Dunbar famous.
The present-day Negro poets do not, as has been asserted, spurn dialect. Many of them have given a portion of their pages to character pieces in dialect, humorous in effect. Whether those who have excluded such pieces from their books have done so on principle or not I cannot say. In general, however, these writers are too deeply earnest for dialect verse, and the “broken tongue” is too suggestive of broken bodies and servile souls. But by those who have employed dialect its uses and effects have been well understood. Dialect, as is proven by Burns, Lowell, Riley, Dunbar, often gets nearer the heart than the language of the schools is able to do, and for home-spun philosophy, for mother-wit, for folk-lore, and for racial humor, for whatever is quaint and peculiar and native in any people, it is the only proper medium. Poets of the finest art from Theocritus to Tennyson have so used it. Genius here as elsewhere will direct the born poet and instruct him when to use dialect and when the language that centuries of tradition have refined and standardized and encrusted with poetic associations. There is a world of poetic wealth in the strangely naïve heart of the rough-schooled Negro for which the smooth-worn, disconsonanted language of the cabin and the field is beautifully appropriate. There is also another world of poetic wealth in the Negro of culture for which only the language of culture is adequate. To such we must say: “All things are yours.”
While, as remarked, many Negro verse-writers have used dialect occasionally, in the ways indicated, Waverley Turner Carmichael has made it practically his one instrument of expression in his little book entitled From the Heart of a Folk. A representative piece is the following:
MAMMY’S BABY SCARED
Hush now, mammy’s baby scaid,
Don’ it cry, eat yo’ bread;
Nothin’ ain’t goin’ bother you,
Does’, it bothers mammy too.
Mammy ain’t goin’ left it ’lone
W’ile de chulen all are gone;
Hush, now, don’ it cry no mo’e,
Ain’t goin’ lay it on de flo’.