And eyes obsessed with vacant stare
Looked over heads to empty air,
As though they sought to find therein
Redemption for a maiden sin.
’Twas thus, amid force-driven grace,
We found the lost look on her face;
And then, to us, did it occur
That, though we saw—we saw not her.
Returning to Mr. McKay, we may assert that his new volume of verse, Harlem Shadows, confirms and enhances the estimate of him we have expressed.
X. Leslie Pinckney Hill
Leslie Pinckney Hill
Bearing the diploma of the Lyric Muse, Mr. Leslie Pinckney Hill, schoolmaster of Cheyney, Pennsylvania, and authentic singer, is one of the newest arrivals on the slopes of Parnassus. A first glance tells that he is an agile climber, sinewy, easy of movement, light of step, with both grace and strength. Every indication in form and motion is for some point far up toward the summit. Youthful he is, ambitious, plainly, and, in spite of a burden, buoyant. “Climber,” I said. I will drop the figure. Poets were never pedestrians. Mr. Hill comes not afoot. If not on the wings of Pegasus, yet on wings he comes—the wings of oppression. Sad wings! yet it must be remarked that it is commonly on such wings that poets of whatever race and time rise. And Mr. Hill’s race knows no other wings. On the wings of oppression the Negro poet and the Negro people are rising toward the summits of Parnassus, Pisgah, and other peaks. This they know, too, and of it they are justly proud.
In his Foreword Mr. Hill thus states the case of his people, and, by implication, of himself: “Nothing in the life of the nation has seemed to me more significant than that dark civilization which the colored man has built up in the midst of a white society organized against it. The Negro has been driven under all the burdens of oppression, both material and spiritual, to the brink of desperation, but he has always been saved by his philosophy of life. He has advanced against all opposition by a certain elevation of his spirit. He has been made strong in tribulation. He has constrained oppression to give him wings.”
The significant thing about these wings, in a critical view, is that they fulfill the proper function of wings—bear aloft and sustain in flight through the azure depths. Mr. Hill’s wings do bear aloft and sustain: if not always, nor even ever, into the very empyrean of poetry yet invariably, seventy times, into the ampler air. Like all his race, he has suffered much; and, like all his race still, he has gathered wisdom from sorrow. As a true poet should have, he has philosophy, also vision and imagination—vision for himself and his people, imagination that sees facts in terms of beauty and presents truths with vital imagery. Add thereto craftsmanship acquired in the best traditions of English poetry and you have Hill the poet.