You ’mind me of the winter’s eve
When low the sinking sun
Casts soft bright rays upon the snow
And day, now almost done,
In silence deep prepares to leave,
And calmly waits the signal “Go.”
Your eyes are faded vestal lights
That once the hearth illumed,
Where vestal virgins vigil kept,
And budding virtue bloomed:
Like stars that beam on summer nights,
Your eyes, by joy and sorrow swept.
Less beautiful, less original, but in another way not less appealing, are these stanzas, also signed by an unknown name and taken from the Christmas number of a newspaper. They are the last stanzas but one of a poem entitled The Child Is Found, by Charles H. Este:
O hearts that mourn and sorrow so,
That doubt the power of God,
An angel now is bending low—
To comfort as you plod.
He speaks with tones of whispering love,
With feelings true and strong,
And sings of sweetest joys above,
For souls without a song.
Pride of race, no less than grief for wrongs endured, is one of the notes of this living verse. Eulogies of the men and women who have lived heroically for their people, giving vision, quickening aspiration, opening roads of advance, find a place in every volume of verse and in the pages of newspapers. Few white persons perhaps have paused to reflect how noteworthy this traditionary store of heroic names really is and how potent it is with the people inheriting it. Both practical and poetic uses—if these two things are different—it has. One cannot foretell to what reflections upon life the eulogist will be led ere he concludes. From an ode to Booker T. Washington, by Roscoe Riley Dungee, I take a stanza, by way of illustration:
Yet, virtue walks a path obscure,
And honor struggles to endure,
While arrogance and deeds impure
Adorn the Hall of Fame.
Still, power triumphs over right,
And wrong is victor in the fight;
Greed, graft, and knavery excite
Vociferous acclaim.
It has become evident to those who have seriously studied the present-day life of the Negroes that there has been in these recent years a renascence of the Negro soul. Poetry, as these pages will show, is one of its modes of expression. Other expressions there are, very significant ones, too, expressions which are material, tangible, expressible in figures. Not of this kind is poetry. Yet of all forms whereby the soul of a people expresses itself the most potent, the most effective, is poetry. The re-born soul of the Negro is following the tradition of all races in all times by pouring itself into that form of words which embodies the most of passionate thought and feeling.
Out of the very heart of a race of twelve million people amongst us comes this cry which a Negro poet of Virginia utters as
A PRAYER OF THE RACE THAT GOD MADE BLACK