AS THE OLD YEAR PASSED
I stood with dear friend Death awhile last night,
Out where the stars shone with a lustre true
In sacred dreams and all the old and new
Of love and life winged in a silver flight
Off to the sea of peace that waits where white,
Pale silences melt in the tranquil blue
Of skies so tender beauty doth imbue
The time with holiness and singing light.
My heart is Life, my soul, O Death, is thine!
Is thine to kiss with yearning life again,
Is thine to strengthen and to sweet incline
To peace and mellowed dream of joy’s refrain.
I’ll stand with Death again to-night, I think,
Out where the stars reveal life’s deeper brink.
VII. Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.
Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.
Poets are born and nurtured in all conditions of life: Joseph Cotter the elder was a slave-woman’s child; Dunbar wrote his first book between the runs of the elevator he tended; Leon R. Harris was left in infancy to the dreary shelter of an orphanage, then indentured to a brutal farmer; Carmichael came from the cabin of an unlettered farmer in the Black Belt of Alabama; of a dozen others the story is similar. Born in poverty, up through adversities they struggled, with little human help save perhaps from the croons and caresses of a singing mother, and a few terms at a wretched school, they toiled into the kingdom of knowledge and entered the world of poetry. Some, however, have had the advantages afforded by parents of culture and of means. Among these is the subject of this sketch, the son of Bishop J. H. Jones, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He has had the best educational opportunity offered by American colleges. He is a graduate of Brown University. Writing has been his employment since graduation, and he has been on the staffs of several New England papers. His first book of poems, entitled The Heart of the World (1919), now in the second edition, reveals at once a student of poetry and an independent artist in verse. His second book, Poems of the Four Seas (1921), shows that his vein is still rich in ore.
In Chapter VIII I give his “Goodbye, Old Year.” Another poem of similar technique takes for its title the last words of Colonel Roosevelt: “Turn out the light, please.” The reader cannot but note the sense of proper effect exhibited in the short sentences, the very manner of a dying man. But more than this will be perceived in this poem. It will seem to have sprung out of the world-weary soul of the young poet himself. Struggle, grief, weariness in the strife, have been his also. Hence:
TURN OUT THE LIGHT