The Negro might well be expected to exhibit a gift for poetry. His gift for oratory has long been acknowledged. The fact has been accepted without reflection upon its significance. It should have been foreseen that because of the close kinship between oratory and poetry the Negro would some day, with more culture, achieve distinction in the latter art, as he had already achieved distinction in the former art. The endowments which make for distinction in these two great kindred arts, it must also be remarked, have not been properly esteemed in the Negro. In other races oratory and poetry have been accepted as the tokens of noble qualities of character, lofty spiritual gifts. Such they are, in all races. They spring from mankind’s supreme spiritual impulses, from mankind’s loftiest aspirations—the aspirations for freedom, for justice, for virtue, for honor and distinction.
That these impulses, these aspirations, and these endowments are in the American Negro and are now exhibiting themselves in verse—it is this I wish to show to the skeptically minded. It will readily be admitted that the Negro nature is endowed above most others, if not all others, in fervor of feeling, in the completeness of self-surrender to emotion. Hence we see that marvelous display of rhythm in the individual and in the group. This capacity of submission to a higher harmony, a grander power, than self, affords the explanation of mankind’s highest reaches of thought, supreme insights, and noblest expressions. Rhythm is its manifestation. It is the most central and compulsive law of the universe. The rhythmic soul falls into harmony and co-operation with the universal creative energy. It therefore becomes a creative soul. Rhythm visibly takes hold of the Negro and sways his entire being. It makes him one with the universal Power that Goethe describes, in famous lines, as “at the roaring loom of time, weaving for God the garment thou seest him by.”
But fervor of feeling must have some originating cause. That cause is a conception—the vivid, concrete presentation of an object or idea to the mind. The Negro has this endowment also. Ideas enter his mind with a vividness and power which betoken an extraordinary faculty of imagination. The graphic originality of language commonly exhibited by the Negro would be sufficient proof of this were other proof wanting. No one will deny to the Negro this gift. Whoever has listened to a colored preacher’s sermon, either of the old or the new school, will recall perhaps more than one example of poetic phrasing, more than one word-picture, that rendered some idea vivid beyond vanishing. It no doubt has been made, in the ignorant or illiterate, an object of jest, just as the other two endowments have been; but these three gifts are the three supreme gifts of the poet, and the poet is the supreme outcome of the race: power of feeling, power of imagination, power of expression—and these make the poet.
1. The Spirituals
As a witness of the Negro’s untutored gift for song there are the Spirituals, his “canticles of love and woe,” chanted wildly, in that darkness which only a few rays from heaven brightened. Since they afford, as it were, a background for the song of cultured art which now begins to appear, I must here give a word to these crude old plantation songs. They are one of the most notable contributions of any people, similarly circumstanced, to the world’s treasury of song, altogether the most appealing. Their significance for history and for art—more especially for art—awaits interpretation. There are signs that this interpretation is not far in the future. Dvorak, the Bohemian, aided by the Negro composer, Harry T. Burleigh, may have heralded, in his “New World Symphony,” the consummate achievement of the future which shall be entirely the Negro’s. Had Samuel Coleridge-Taylor been an American instead of an English Negro, this theme rather than the Indian theme might have occupied his genius—the evidence whereof is that, removed as he was from the scenes of plantation life and the tribulations of the slaves, yet that life and those tribulations touched his heart and found a place, though a minor one, in his compositions.
But the sister art of poetry may anticipate music in the great feat of embodying artistically the yearning, suffering, prayerful soul of the African in those centuries when he could only with patience endure and trust in God—and wail these mournfullest of melodies. Some lyrical drama like “Prometheus Bound,” but more touching as being more human; some epic like “Paradise Lost,” but nearer to the common heart of man, and more lyrical; some “Divina Commedia,” that shall be the voice of those silent centuries of slavery, as Dante’s poem was the voice of the long-silent epoch preceding it, or some lyrical “passion play” like that of Oberammergau, is the not improbable achievement of some descendant of the slaves.
In a poem of tender appeal, James Weldon Johnson has celebrated the “black and unknown bards,” who, without art, and even without letters, produced from their hearts, weighed down with sorrows, the immortal Spirituals:
O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre?
Who first from midst his bonds lifted his eyes?
Who first from out the still watch, lone and long,
Feeling the ancient faith of prophets rise
Within his dark-kept soul, burst into song?
So begins this noble tribute to the nameless natural poets whose hearts, touched as a harp by the Divine Spirit, gave forth “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Nobody Knows de Trouble I See,” “Steal Away to Jesus,” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll.”
Great praise does indeed rightly belong to that black slave-folk who gave to the world this treasure of religious song. To the world, I say, for they belong as truly to the whole world as do the quaint and incomparable animal stories of Uncle Remus. Their appeal is to every human heart, but especially to the heart that has known great sorrow and which looks to God for help.