The merit of his book cannot be shown by lines and stanzas. As ever with true art, the merit lies in the whole effect of complete poems. Still, we may here first detach from this and that poem a stanza or two, despite the wrong to art. The first and fourth stanzas of the title-poem will indicate Mr. Hill’s technique and philosophy:
I have a song that few will sing
In honor of all suffering,
A song to which my heart can bring
The homage of believing—
A song the heavy-laden hears
Above the clamor of his fears,
While still he walks with blinding tears,
And drains the cup of grieving.
******
So long as life is steeped in wrong,
And nations cry: “How long, how long!”
I look not to the wise and strong
For peace and self-possession;
But right will rise, and mercy shine,
And justice lift her conquering sign
Where lowly people starve and pine
Beneath a world oppression.
The character and temper of the Negro in those gentler aspects which make such an appeal to the heart are revealed in the following sonnet:
MATER DOLOROSA
O mother, there are moments when I know
God’s presence to the full. The city street
May wrap me in the tumult and the heat
Of futile striving; bitter winds may blow
With winter-wilting freeze of hail and snow,
And all my hopes lie shattered in defeat;
But in my heart the springtime blossoms sweet,
And heaven seems very near the way I go.
These moments are the angels of that prayer
Which thou hast breathed for many a troubled year
With bended knee and swarthy-streaming face—
“Uphold him, Father, with a double care:
He is but mortal, yet his days must bear
The world cross, and the burden of his race.”
If these poems, taken collectively, do not declare “what is on the Negro’s mind” they yet truly reveal, to the reflecting person, what has sunk deep into his heart. They are therefore a message to America, a protest, an appeal, and a warning. They will penetrate, I predict, through breast-armor of aes triplex into the hearts of those whom sermons and editorials fail to touch in the springs of action. Such is the virtue of music wed to persuasive words. In strong lines of soaring blank verse, in which Mr. Hill is particularly capable, he makes a direct appeal to America in behalf of his people, in a poem entitled Armageddon:
Because ye schooled them in the arts of life,
And gave to them your God, and poured your blood
Into their veins to make them what they are,
They shall not fail you in the hour of need.
They own in them enough of you to feel
All that has made you masters in your time—
Dear art and riches, unremitting toil,
Proud types of beauty, an unbounded will
To triumph, wondrous science and old law—
These have they learned to covet and to share.
But deeper in them still is something steeled
To hot abhorrence and unmeasured dread
Of your undaunted sins against the light—
Red sins of lust, of envy and of hate,
Of guilty gain extorted from the weak,
Of brotherhood traduced, and God denied.
All this have they beheld without revolt,
And borne the brunt in agonizing prayer.
For other strains of blood that flow from times
Older than Egypt, whence the dark man gave
The rudiments of learning to all lands,
Have been a strong constraint. And they have dreamed
Of a peculiar mission under heaven,
And felt the force of unexampled gifts
That make for them a rare inheritance—
The gift of cheerful confidence in man,
The gift of calm endurance, solacing
An infinite capacity for pain,
The gift of an unfeigned humility,
Blinding the eyes of strident arrogance
And bigot pride to that philosophy
And that far-glancing wisdom which it veils,
Of joy in beauty, hardihood in toil,
Of hope in tribulation, and of wide
Adaptive power without a parallel
In chronicles of men.