On “If We Must Die” - Marcellus Blount

Many of McKay's published sonnets betray the terms of his search for an ideal racial self. He fixes his own dilemma in the context of the black man's insistent quest for racial authority. Feeling his own increasing burdens as a representative of the race in literature, he engenders himself as a black man who speaks for his race in general and to other black men in particular. His most famous sonnet, "If We Must Die," demonstrates the tension between racial and gendered utterances. The poem presents a traditional ideal of black masculinity:

[quotes poem]

Written in 1919, in the wake of the Red Scare and the Red Summer of race riots throughout the urban centers of the United States, "If We Must Die" is McKay's bold statement of a masculine, racial strategy. The nobility of his chosen form reaffirmed the conventions of dignity and the structures of address to which the poem's personae aspire. Etched into the consciousness of literate black Americans for generations to come as a model of Afro-American heroism, this poem has become a point of reference for the entire racial experience and a touchstone of the Afro-American entry into subjectivity. As Winston Churchill used it as a rallying cry to call the British into sustained battle against the Nazis, this single poem of renunciation earned McKay an international reputation even beyond his race.

While they speak for the entire race, the militant selves of the poem are in fact explicitly "male." The phrase "If we must die" utters the poem's call to participation, and it gathers meaning through its repetition in the first and second quatrains. The phrase "O kinsmen!" makes that call to participation explicit; the poem's would-be warriors are men. McKay fails to explicate the unique position of women within this embattled black community, choosing instead to talk about the race by imagining the aspirations of black men. The contest for black humanity in the poem is waged exclusively through the battle for black masculinity. Within the poem's rhetoric of pursuing honor and dignty, maleness is one of the spoils of the racial battle. In relation to white men, it is the ultimate mark of heroism. Whatever the position of women, for McKay this battle is between men.

Following Dunbar's footsteps by placing Afro-Americans in the heroic sonnet, McKay is the first to represent a collective Afro-American self within the slender technical boundaries of the sonnet form. In "If We Must Die," McKay gives public voice to other black men who might speak privately for all black people. The poem enacts McKay's powerful struggle for a masculine identity as a black writer in the midst of racial oppression. From the vantage point of his vocation as black writer, he turns to language to relieve the dissonance of his perception of what his life has become upon emigrating from Jamaica and his realization that his native culture of class distinction and apparent civility has ill prepared him for the viciousness of the racism that surrounded him daily. In the poem, McKay ultimately retreats to the social order of his youth with its values of personal honor. Death might come, be it not "inglorious."

"If We Must Die" builds its contrasts not between man and woman but rather man and beast, both terms variously construed. In an essay entitled "A Negro Poet Writes," the Jamaican-born McKay had written earlier of his initiation into American racism: "I ceased to think of people

1

and things in the mass—why should I fight with mad dogs only to be bitten and probably transformed into a mad dog myself?" The resonant figures of bestiality here and in the poem underscore the extent to which McKay was haunted by the terms of his own dehumanization: the hostility and "ignoble cruelty" of what he witnessed in the United States. With his sense of nobility, McKay inherits a good deal of what Wayne Cooper, McKay's biographer, calls "the heroic sentimentalism of Victorian England." British imperialism left its mark on the British West Indies in many ways, and clearly McKay's experience of transplanted Victorian culture informed his writing. In part through his "special friendship" with his British patron, Walter Jekyll, he learned to internalize Victorian myths about male behavior in an aristocratic society. The sonnet form becomes an appropriate battlefield for the contest between McKay's sense of himself as a gentleman and the need to respond to racial violence. The gentlemanly form of the sonnet girds the language of warfare within the codes of nineteenth-century combat. Such codes allow McKay to fight racism on his own terms. With its heroic sentimentality, "If We Must Die" is for McKay the black male "deathblow" that will assure his possession of the rigid ideal of masculinity that comes as the poem's prize.

from "Caged Birds: Race and Gender in the Sonnet." In Engendering Men, ed. Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden. New York: Routledge, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc.

Blount, Marcellus. "on ‘If We Must Die.’” Modern America Poetry. University of Illinois, n.d.

Web. 24 Sept. 2012.

2

On “Tropics in New York” - Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon, and is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to literary journals. In the following essay, Semansky explores how McKay’s vivid and evocative imagery functions in “The Tropics in New York.”

In the first stanza of his poem, “The Tropics in New York,” Claude McKay describes a veritable cornucopia of fruits and plants. After we finish reading this stanza we can almost taste these exotic delicacies, the ripe bananas, the ginger-root, the alligator pears. The words seem to have a power of their own to make our mouths water. This is the power of imagery.

Imagery, when effective, has the ability to make the reader experience the thing or things being described, in this case the tropical fruits of McKay’s birthplace, Jamaica. It is not only the naming of the fruit that makes McKay’s imagery effective, but the manner in which he does it—by listing the different kinds. A list by its very definition is an accumulation of details and remains a popular poetic device writers use to achieve an almost photographic effect of the things described. In this case, the sense stimulated is not only vision but taste as well, for these are perfect specimens, “fit for the highest prize at parish fairs.”

We learn in the second stanza that the delicacies described are not in fact in Jamaica but in New York City, a steamy place in the summer but definitely not the tropics. McKay might be using irony by titling his poem, “The Tropics in New York,” then, or he simply might be using “tropics” as a rough synecdoche. A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to signify the whole.

In this case “tropics” might be (metaphorically) read as tropical fruit, but simultaneously stand in for all of the tropics. However, these tropical treats do remind the speaker of his homeland. The sight of them brings memories “of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills / And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies / in benediction over nun-like hills.” Rills are small brooks or streams that lace Jamaica’s countryside, and the hills are nun-like because blue skies are offering a blessing.

This stanza also signals a move from the specific to the general, as the sight of individual pieces of fruit (possibly in a bowl) moves the speakers so that he remembers the conditions that physically enabled their existence (dawn, skies, hills). The reader can also consider the present, in which the speaker initially sees the fruit in the window as the fruit of the past. That is, the speaker’s initial experience of his homeland made possible the nostalgia and longing he feels when seeing a bowl of fruit years later.

Nostalgia is a fitting theme for a poet who left his native country as a young man to come to the United States. It is also a subject made popular by English Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, who wrote many poems mourning the loss of traditions, people, and humanity’s relationship to nature. McKay, in “The Tropics in New York,” is not merely expressing his yearning for Jamaican fruit. He is showing the reader through his choice of details what he misses about his country: its spectacular landscape; its spirituality; its sheer fecundity. McKay could have written a poem about how after stumbling across seashells at a corner store he was

3

suddenly reminded of the Jamaican coast, but writing about such a commonplace item as fruit allowed him to pack more resonance in his images.

We associate ripe fruit, especially tropical fruit, with abundance, with the sheer headiness of being alive and growing. It is exotic and sweet and pleasurable, much like many of our own (good) memories of childhood. Though as readers we are not consciously aware of these associations, they are there nonetheless and affect our reception of the poem.

After two stanzas of description, the narrator discusses its significance. We now understand that we were seeing what the speaker was seeing, that the narrator’s “I” was the photographic eye. This stanza, however, contains no description because the speaker’s “eyes grew dim.” Instead we have a comment on the previous description, which allows us to understand the description’s purpose. This stanza tells us the meaning of what the first two stanzas showed us. The speaker is hungry, not for bananas, cocoa, mangoes, and grapefruit, but “for the old, familiar ways.” McKay’s use of the word “hungry” to describe his desire is appropriate, given the poem’s imagery.

In “Claude McKay’s Romanticism,” in CLA Journal, Geta LeSeur writes that “the progression [from the first two stanzas to the third] is from glorious song to despair. It is one of his most moving poems on this theme.” The reader must keep in mind, however, that the despair is also informed by the speaker’s implicit recognition of the discrepancy between New York City, one of the largest urban centers in the world, and the pastoral, idyllic setting McKay portrays as his home.

“The Tropics in New York” first appeared in 1920 in The Liberator, a radical socialist newspaper. There is nothing, however, explicitly or implicitly radical about the poem. In fact, an argument could be made that the piece is conservative because of the (implicit) desire the speaker expresses to go home again.

Though a communist sympathizer for a good part of his adult life, many of McKay’s early poems deal with traditional themes and subject matter. In many ways he was a modern romantic. Like the Romantics, McKay frequently wrote out of personal experience; the “I” in the poem was more often than not McKay. LeSeur observes that “McKay obviously is the speaker in this poem, although he speaks for the hundreds of West Indians who became exiles away from their homeland primarily because of economic and diplomatic reasons. The poem, therefore, does have a oneness of feeling about it. The alienation felt is one of time and distance, and the consequence and helplessness is clearly felt in the last three lines.”

Though McKay wrote about his hunger for the old ways of his native land, we can also read this poem as an example, though not the best, of McKay’s own theory of poetry. In his theory, he frequently promoted traditional poetic forms. In his introduction to Harlem Shadows, his only book of verse, McKay writes that the eighteenth-century Scottish poet, Robert Burns—a traditionalist—was a primary influence on his work. McKay believed that the traditional should “work best on lawless and revolutionary passion and words, so as to give the feeling of the highest degree of spontaneity and freedom.”

4

However, it is hard to see exactly how lawless and revolutionary McKay’s own words and passions are in “The Tropics.” Written in iambic pentameter and employing an abab cdcd efef rhyme scheme, this lyric poem focuses on the lament of one individual, not, as LeSeur suggests, the numerous exiles from the West Indies. A lyric is usually a short poem consisting of the words of a single speaker. Employing the first person “I,” the lyric most often revolves around or expresses the feeling or state of mind of the speaker.

Burns’s poem, “O my love’s like a red, red rose,” for example, expresses the speaker’s passion for his sweetheart. Lyrics may or may not be written in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter means that each of the poem’s lines consist of five (penta) feet. Meter is measured in feet, and a foot usually contains a stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllables. An “iambic” foot, the most common in English poetry, consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The first line of “The Tropics,”—“Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root”—contains ten syllables, alternately unstressed and stressed.

McKay uses a traditional form to write about traditional subjects, loss and nostalgia. It is precisely his use of tradition that critics have applauded, viewing him as a poet whose work embodies universal rather than African American ideals. Perhaps better examples of his theory of how traditional forms can give shape to radical content are his Shakespearean sonnets, “America” and “The White City.” Both of these poems criticize America and the cultural oppression of African Americans but they do so in a way that conventional critics appreciate. Said another way, critics have praised McKay because he played by the rules.

Semansky, Chris. “Tropics in New York.” Poetry for Students Vol. 4. 1998. Gale Virtual

Reference Library. Web. 3 Sept. 2012.

5

On “A Black Man Talks of Reaping” - David Kelly

Kelly is a writer and instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, he uses "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" to discuss the ways in which Bontemps establishes the injustice of his society and how he indicates that change is inevitable.

It is quite likely that the ultimate inspiration for Arna Bontemps's poem "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" is to be found in the New Testament of the Bible, in the letter of Paul to the Galatians. There, Paul admonishes a people who he sees as drifting away from their religious faith, telling them, "Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap." The image Paul uses, whether originated by him or not, is so potent that the phrase "you reap what you sow" is still a commonly-used expression to this day, long after the United States completed the shift from a agriculture-based economy. When Bontemps's poem was written in the 1920s, the country was in the middle of the shift from an agrarian culture to an industrial society. Since then, the U.S. economy has gone ever further beyond that, to an economy based in information exchange.

As in the letter of Paul to the Galatians, the image of sowing and reaping carries a vague insinuation of danger in the way Bontemps uses it. However, there is a telling difference: Paul seems to be implying a more direct relationship between behaviors and consequences than Bontemps offers. While in "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" Bontemps warns readers that a particular behavior will bring specific results, he also adds an extra step, shrouded in mystery. The way this poem frames the situation, the disenfranchisement of black Americans from social advancement had yielded no observable consequences for white society at the time of Bontemps's writing, but the poem clearly indicates that consequences will be inevitable. Bontemps shows the pressure building for equality, and he also mentions the natural relationship between reaping and sowing, making it clear that black Americans were forbidden participation in the actual reaping of benefits of their work. Readers cannot help drawing the direct conclusion that the natural balance between reaping and sowing, which Paul in his letter to the Galatians attributes to God's will, is being violated in a way that must be corrected by any means, even if eventual confrontation might be the outcome.

The text of the poem subtly provides a persuasive argument against some of the most commonly-used justifications for racial inequality. For example, it states that the problems foisted onto the race of a people who originated in Africa cannot be ignored as a simply regional issue, as northern whites might have been inclined to do. Bontemps begins his poem by having his narrator note that he has sown seeds beside all waters, drawing attention to the universality of the black experience. This might not seem to be the most significant aspect about being black in the United States, but it is weighty enough for him to emphasize it in the poem's first words, to tell his audience that any urge to ignore this problem as some other region's issue is naive and intellectually dishonest. The inclusive "all" makes clear that segregation is not just a "southern" problem or even just an "American" problem, that racial injustice is bound to have global implications.

Once it has established that the situation faced by blacks is not just limited to the American South, the poem addresses two other excuses that were commonly used to justify unequal

6

treatment. The first is the assumption that blacks were responsible for their own predicament because they were too lazy to take control of their own destiny. It would be difficult, if not outright impossible, for any reasonable reader of this poem to ignore the constant struggles that Bontemps depicts, of people fighting against a social engine that works to stymie them at every turn. Bontemps captures, in the poem's few lines, the work and care needed to nurture a growing plant from seed to maturity, a struggle played out across the country. Raising crops like this is not something that could be accomplished by people who were not diligent. Rather than argue against the "laziness" excuse, the poem simply sweeps it away with broad, solid evidence of the black workers' diligence.

The poem not only shows the workers' diligence, it also shows their intelligence, dispensing with the other commonly-used argument for having rules separating the races. Bontemps establishes the wit of the poem's narrator and his people by showing solid knowledge of successful farming procedures and skillful poetry. In this poem, black farmers provide smart responses to the troubles that nature throws at them, adapting to wind erosion and predators that want to feed off of their fresh-planted seeds by protecting the seeds with deeper layers of dirt. They plant their seeds in rows to counter the problems of soil erosion. These farmers may not be educated in the traditional sense, having been locked out of formal education by laws and social mores, but Bontemps steers past education as a measure of intelligence, putting the focus on forms of intelligence that are even more important for what they are trying to accomplish.

Intelligence is also established here by the poet's solid, understated skill. This poem is a tour de force for Bontemps, a showpiece for his talent that does not draw attention to its form. Bontemps works within a closed traditional form, squeezing his ideas into quatrains and iambic pentameter, following poetic standards that have been in place for centuries with such grace that readers might just take his technical mastery for granted. The poet's intelligence is present in every line, though, like the intelligence of the farmers who are the poem's subject. It is not talked about—it is simply there. The poem does not address the wisdom of the people it is discussing, instead taking the position that such intelligence must be obvious.

In the end, this poem uses a dual-edged meaning to explain the idea of reaping. When talking about reaping in agricultural terms, Bontemps is fairly direct in stating that reaping was forbidden to those who sowed the seeds. The black farmers presumably held the hope, while planting the seeds and tending the crops, that they might be able to prosper when the time for harvesting comes, but that never was the case. They were allowed to pick off the little that was left and considered unusable: the stalks and roots and gleanings left on the ground, just enough to sustain them and feed their hope. The people who have planted the crops are not allowed to reap what they have sown, which as the letter of Paul to the Galatians states is contrary to the laws of nature.

However, natural law and Biblical law should not be subverted. While Bontemps does not openly state it in "A Black Man Talks of Reaping," he does hint at a danger that a discerning reader can hardly ignore. The last few lines of the poem make it clear that something is bound to happen, that the bitter fruit given to the coming generation to feed on will only lead to resentment, then resistance. Injustice can only be tolerated for so long before it boils over. For a writer working in the 1920s, when even the threat of violence was something any black

7

American knew could put him or her in danger, it is quite understandable that Bontemps would not say openly that there was an inevitable clash of cultures to come. He could not speak as freely as, say, his friend Langston Hughes put it decades later in his 1951 poem "Harlem (A Dream Deferred)." Though Bontemps was not in a position to explicitly address the anger and frustration building up among black Americans, he was able to show social injustice powerfully enough to make all readers of all races empathetic to the situation forced on the title's black man. The implication is clear: such injustice, if left unaddressed for generation after generation, can only lead to a forced change.

The letter of Paul to the Galatians introduces the reaping/sowing metaphor, but it also addresses the situation that Bontemps gives readers, where sowing and reaping have been separated from one another. "And let us not grow weary in well-doing," Paul writes, "for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart." "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" could have followed Paul's tone of gentleness and reiterated his faith in the future. Bontemps instead used the poem as a warning that something was bound to change, soon, once the patience of a generation raised with nothing of its own was exhausted. This poem is not a call to action; it is not telling its readers that the time for waiting is done, but only that there is inevitably going to be a time when waiting is no longer an option.

Kelly, David. “A Black Man Talks of Reaping.” Poetry for Students. 2010. Gale Virtual

Reference Library. Web. 3 Sept. 2012.

8

On “Any Human to Another” - Aidan Wasley

Aidan Wasley is a writer and instructor at Yale University. In the following essay, Wasley examines Cullen’s belief that all people share experiences and are bound together by common threads of pain and suffering regardless of race, age, or gender.

Countee Cullen’s poem “Any Human to Another” presents, on first reading, a vision of community based on the universality of suffering and grief. The title suggests that the words of the poem are not simply those of the poet himself, but could instead be spoken by “any human to another,” and that regardless of apparent differences like age, sex, creed, class, or race, what binds us all together is our shared experience of life’s pain:

Joy may be shy, unique,Friendly to a few,Sorrow never scorned to speakTo any whoWere false or true.

Not everyone feels joy in their lives, says Cullen, but no one escapes sorrow. It is this commonality that defines us all as human.

This is an old idea, but Cullen’s poem moves beyond the traditional assertion that human life is, in the customary phrase, a “vale of tears.” The pain and grief that Cullen speaks of are not passively suffered, as if they were unavoidable facts of life. Rather, they are actively inflicted, by “any human” on another. Sorrows are imagined as weapons, “arrows” which “pierce to the marrow,” driven not by nature or some divine force which decrees that we must suffer, but by other men:

Your every grieflike a bladeShining and unsheathedMust strike me down.

What makes us a community then is not just that we all suffer pain, but that we inflict that pain on each other. We are bound together by our capacity to hurt one another.

Cullen expresses this sense of fraught inter-connectedness in various ways throughout the poem. The speaker addresses the reader, telling him:

Your grief and mineMust intertwineLike sea and river,Be fused and mingle,Diverse yet single,Forever and forever.

9

The griefs of one “must intertwine” with those of another: what one suffers, the other must also suffer. The formal structure of the poem supports this idea of sensations being “fused and mingled,” as it avoids a fixed rhyming scheme in favor of a shifting, fluid form full of internal rhymes (”sorrow”/“arrow”) and varying metrical patterns. The rhymes “intertwine” with one another, as in the first stanza’s abccab scheme, while the insistence of the Page 9  |  Top of Articlerhymes themselves suggest the force of a connection that transcends differences. The rhymes connect lines that can be next to one another and with similar stress patterns (“be fused and mingle, / diverse yet single”), or which are many lines apart and with different metrical values (“The ills I sorrow at” / “Through the fat”). What one line sings, another often very different line echoes.

Just as one line echoes another, so too is Cullen’s theme of shared experience and responsibility an echo of a well-known passage from the New Testament in which Christ tells the damned at the Last Judgment, “Whatosever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me” (Mt. 25.40). Cullen, the son of a Methodist minister, is alluding to, and adapting, the Christian notion that sins against one’s fellow man are sins against God. In doing so, Cullen places the speaker of the poem in the position of Christ, and engages in a subtle reversal of the Biblical passage. The Christ-like speaker of Cullen’s poem tells his reader, in effect, ‘Whatever you do to me, you do to yourself’: “Of bitter aloes wreathed, / My sorrow must be laid / On your head like a crown.”

The image of the persecuted Christ is an extremely important one for Cullen, who uses it again and again in his poetry as a complex symbol for the plight of blacks in America. In a poem written six years before this one, Cullen describes the lynching of a “Black Christ,” presenting the hanging of an African-American man in the racist South in terms of the Biblical crucifixion. Similarly, in “Heritage,” Cullen’s most famous poem, he addresses Christ, wishing he were black: “Surely then this flesh would know / Yours had borne a kindred woe.” In “Any Human to Another,” Cullen’s identification of the speaker with Christ encourages us to read this poem as a kind of parable about the relationship between blacks and whites in the United States. The martyr-Christ figure of the speaker represents the history of African-American oppression by whites, whose arrows “pierce” their victim just as the crucified Christ’s side is pierced by a spear. But Cullen’s reversal of Christ’s message—his insistence that persecution places a figurative “crown” of thorns not on the victim but on the oppressor—suggests that the relationship between blacks and whites is an inextricably “intertwined” one. In this community of pain, the poem implies, all are bound together and, in hurting blacks, whites only hurt themselves.

The poem enacts a delicate balance between awareness of the injustices done to blacks by whites, and a desire to move beyond that antagonistic relationship toward one of peaceful, colorblind equality. Cullen simultaneously recalls the African-American history of “sorrow” and “grief” at the hands of whites, while arguing that men should learn to speak, not as blacks or whites, but as “any human to another.” The tension inherent in this poem between the speaker’s consciousness of his race and his wish to transcend it, illustrates a dilemma Cullen faced throughout his poetic career. It is a dilemma which W. E. B Du Bois, the noted scholar and critic (and Cullen’s father-in-law), saw as characteristic of the condition of living as an African-American in a white-dominated culture. In 1903, in his book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois famously wrote: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always

10

looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Du Bois argued that to be black in America was to be forever caught in the conflict between proud acknowledgment of one’s racial heritage and the desire to be seen not as black, but simply as an American.

As a poet, Cullen experienced this inner conflict even more acutely. Torn between the expectation of his audience—both white and black—that he represent his race, and his ambition to be read not as a “Negro” poet but as an “American” one, Cullen’s sense of his own “double-consciousness” led him, in two famous lines from an early poem, to lament, “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black and bid him sing!” (“Yet Do I Marvel”). To make a poet black is, says Cullen, to condemn him to a state of artistic limbo, forever struggling to escape his limiting role as “Negro” poet.

For Cullen, a Harvard-educated scholar, his response to this dilemma throughout his career took the form of his identification with the dominant tradition of white American and European poetry, in contrast to contemporary black poets like Langston Hughes who found their inspiration in the native African-American tradition of spirituals, blues, and jazz. By asserting his alliance with Anglo-American literature, Cullen was staking his claim as a writer who refused to be restricted by the color line. He wanted to be a poet who was seen to soar above and beyond questions of race, who was judged bythe merits of his words, and his relation to past poets, not by the color of his skin.

Yet while Cullen sought to distance himself from preconceived notions of what a black poet could or could not do, one finds evidence of Du Bois’s notion of “warring ideals” even in poems like this one, which self-consciously echoes canonical English poets like Donne in its evocation in the third stanza of Donne’s famous claim, “No man is an island,” and in that stanza’s first line which recalls the language of Donne’s lyric, “Death be not proud.” (Indeed, if one traces Cullen’s imagery back to poems like “The Ecstasy,” which speak of two lovers’ souls being “intergrafted” such that what one feels the other does as well, one might make an argument that this poem be read as a revision of a Donnean love lyric.) “Any Human to Another” is a poem full of dualities and oppositions, from the central theme of “intertwined” sorrows, to the dichotomies the poem draws between pairs like “sea” and “river,” “sun” and “shadow,” “joy” and “sorrow,” and “false” and “true.” Even the final image of the “crown” is an ambiguous one, as this symbol of victory and triumph is, as we have seen, converted into a symbol of shame and sorrow.

“Let no man be so proud,” says Cullen, “To think he is allowed / A little tent … / All his own.” In light of the poem’s concern with its own “unreconciled strivings,” as Du Bois puts it, we can read these lines as a comment on the desire to stand alone, to break from the community of pain that the poem, and African-American history, describes. The lesson, the poem suggests, is that such an escape is never possible. No man can ever truly retreat to his “little tent.” One cannot, and, in the imperative language of the poem, “must” not forget that the history one shares with others, however painful, forges a mutual relation, a connection that cannot be broken. One’s identity is a product of that history, and while that too may be divided and “unreconciled,” it is that very conflict that makes us who we are. To be “any human,” just as it is to be an African-

11

American poet, is to be forever engaged in the conflict between our sense of our own uniqueness, and our place within the larger community of history and culture. Our relationship with “other humans” is always in tension with our individuality. No matter who we are, each of us, says Cullen, is always “diverse yet single.”

Wasley, Aidan. “Any Human to Another.” Poetry for Students Vol. 3. 1998. Gale Virtual

Reference Library. Web. 3 Sept. 2012.

12

On "From the Dark Tower" - Eugenia W. Collier

It seems to me that a poem which effectively expresses the spirit of Harlem Renaissance poetry is "From the Dark Tower," by Countee Cullen. It is a restrained, dignified, poignant work, influenced in form by Keats and Shelley rather than by the moderns. Incidentally, The Dark Tower was actually a place on 136th Street in Harlem, where a number of the poets used to gather. Perhaps Cullen knew he was speaking for the others, too, when he wrote:

We shall not always plant while others reapThe golden increment of bursting fruit,Not always countenance, abject and muteThat lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;Not everlastingly while others sleepShall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,Not always bend to some more subtle brute;We were not made eternally to weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the starkWhite stars is no less lovely being dark,And there are buds that cannot bloom at allIn light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

Let us examine the symbolism contained in the poem. Here we have the often-used symbol of planting seeds and reaping fruit. This symbol invariably refers to the natural sequence of things—the hope eventually realized, or the "just deserts" finally obtained. The sowing-reaping symbol here effectively expresses the frustration that inevitably falls to the individual or group of people caught in an unjust system. The image of a person planting the seeds of his labor, knowing even as he plants that "others" will pluck the fruit, is a picture of the frustration which is so often the Negro's lot. The image necessarily (and perhaps unconsciously) implies certain questions: What must be the feelings of the one who plants? How long will he continue to plant without reward? Will he not eventually stop planting, or perhaps begin seizing the fruit which is rightfully his? In what light does he see himself? How does he regard the "others" who "reap the golden increment of bursting fruit"? What physical and emotional damage results to the laborer from this arrangement to which obviously he never consented?

In his basic symbol then, Cullen expresses the crux of the protest poem which so flourished in the Harlem Renaissance. In poem after poem, articulate young Negroes answered these questions or asked them again, these questions and many more. And in the asking, and in the answering, they were speaking of the old, well-worn (though never quite realized) American ideals.

In the octave of the poem, Cullen answers some of these questions. The grim promise "not always" tolls ominously like an iron bell through the first eight lines. "We shall not always plant while others reap," he promises. By degrees he probes deeper and deeper into the actual meaning

13

of the image. In the next two lines he points out one of many strange paradoxes of social injustice: that the "abject and mute" victim must permit himself to be considered inferior by "lesser men"—that is, men who have lost a measure of their humanity because they have degraded their brothers. This image is a statement of a loss of human values—the "abject and mute" victim of an unjust social system, bereft of spirit, silently serving another who has himself suffered a different kind of loss in robbing his fellow man of his potential—that is, the fruit of his seed. Perhaps this destruction of the human spirit is the "more subtle brute" of which the poet speaks. The last line of the octave promises eventual change in the words, "We were not made eternally to weep." Yet it implies that relief is still a long way off. It is in the sestet that the poem itself blossoms into full-blown dark beauty. With the skill of an impressionistic painter, the poet juxtaposes black and white into a canvas of brilliant contrasts. The night is pictured as being beautiful because it is dark—a welcome relief from the stark whiteness of the stars. The image suggests the pride in Negritude which became important in the Harlem Renaissance—the pride in the physical beauty of black people, the Negro folk culture which has enriched America, the strength which the Negro has earned through suffering. Cullen describes the night as being not only a lovely thing, but also a sheltering thing. The image of the buds that cannot bloom in light suggests that the Negro's experience has created a unique place for him in American culture: there are songs that he alone can sing.

The final couplet combines the beautiful and sheltering concept of darkness with the basic symbol of futile planting. The poet now splashes a shocking red onto his black and white canvas. The dark becomes not only a shelter for developing buds, but also a place to conceal gaping wounds. These two lines are quiet but extremely disturbing: "So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, / And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds." And the reader cannot help wondering, what sort of will grow from these "agonizing seeds"?

from "I Do Not Marvel, Countee Cullen." College Language Association Journal 11.1 (1967).

Collier, Eugenia W. " on ‘From the Dark Tower.’” Modern America Poetry. University of

Illinois, n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2012.

14

On “Reapers” – Cynthia A. Bily

“Reapers” is a short poem of eight lines in iambic pentameter rhymed couplets, a form sometimes referred to as heroic couplets. It appears as the second piece in Jean Toomer’s Cane, a collection of short stories, sketches, and poems intended to show the beauty and strength of African American life. The poem is spoken by a first-person narrator, but this narrator neither enters the action nor comments on it. This is typical of the work collected in Cane: The narrator usually selects particular details to present to the reader but trusts the reader to interpret the details wisely. Only rarely, and usually in prose pieces, does the narrator guide the reader more directly.

The eight lines divide neatly into two sections, each representing a different vision. In the first four lines, black field workers sharpen their scythes with sharpening stones. When they are finished, they place the hones in their pockets and begin cutting. The men are silent; the only sound in the scene is the sound of the steel blades being ground against the stones. The narrator, standing far away (physically or emotionally), dispassionately reports what he sees. In the second four lines, the narrator turns his gaze to another field or another day, and the silent black men are replaced by a machine, a mower, drawn by black horses. The mower has run over a field rat, which lies among the weeds bleeding and squealing. The mower blades, stained with the rat’s blood, continue on their path.

Forms and Devices

“Reapers” is divided into two sections, two scenes, with no commentary from the narrator to help the reader interpret their meaning. That the two are meant as separate pieces is clear, both because of the fact that the only lines that are end-stopped are the fourth and the eighth and because of the pointed similarity of the openings of the two sections: “Black reapers” and “Black horses.” However, the two pieces are closely linked; Toomer has not written the poem in two separate stanzas but as two pairs of paired couplets. The meaning lies simply in the contrasts between the two parts, and the poet uses careful arrangements of sounds in the two scenes to emphasize those contrasts. In the first scene, silent except for “the sound of steel on stones” and the suggested swishing of blades through grass, the poet uses repetitive sibilant sounds as seen in the phrase just quoted and in the second line: “Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones.” The sounds and rhythms of the poem echo the sounds of the scene and direct the reader toward hearing the scene as peaceful and steady.

By contrast, the second scene features a noisy machine and a “squealing” rat, and the sounds of the lines are harsher, with consonants standing side by side to create cacophony. In line 6, the words “field rat, startled, squealing bleeds” must be read one at a time; the ending consonants of one word and the beginning consonants of the next word do not run well together and thus cannot be read aloud smoothly. The consonants in this section are more explosive. For example, the hard c of “continue cutting” is not found at all in the first section, and the insistent near-rhyme of “bleeds,” “blade,” and “blood” can only be intentional. Before turning to writing, Toomer had considered becoming a musical composer, and all of his poetry reveals a deep concern for the musicality of language. Critics have often commented on the lyrical cadences of

15

his poems about natural beauty such as “Georgia Dusk” and “Evening Song” (also from Cane). “Reapers” is an example of his use of the same ear to echo the sounds of men and machines.

Themes and Meanings

For Toomer, one of life’s essential truths was that industrialized society had ground humankind down, destroying people’s natural goodness and sense of community. As industrialization increased, the world became more chaotic. In “Reapers” and in the longer Cane from which it is taken, Toomer explores the dichotomy between humans and machines and, by extension, between the human and the subhuman or nonhuman qualities of people. Humans can feel and care, they can make moral choices, but machines cannot. “Reapers” demonstrates this truth by setting two scenes side by side: a scene of men working in a field and a scene of a mowing machine. In the first scene, all the work is done by humans with hand tools. Notably, it takes more than one reaper to do the job; doing work by hand requires more workers and therefore builds or sustains a community. Toomer pointedly calls these men reapers rather than mowers or cutters. They are reaping, or cutting and gathering, with a purpose: to provide food.

The machine, on the other hand, is a mower cutting weeds. It is driven by two horses; the human driver, if there is one, is not seen and does not appear to be directing the action. Instead, the narrator presents only a mindless machine pulled by mindless animals with no sense of purpose and no human sensibilities. A machine cannot react to a squeal of pain or a stain of blood. It does not know what it destroys, and it would not care if it did know. Toomer believed that people who harm or oppress others do so because they have given up their human qualities and have become like machines.

The pessimistic tone of “Reapers” is typical of the section of Cane in which it appears. Just before “Reapers” is a short story, “Karintha,” about a beautiful and innocent child of the South who is ultimately destroyed by the sexual mistreatment of the men around her. “Reapers” is followed by another poem, “November Cotton Flower,” and a short story, “Becky,” both about victimized and defeated women. Throughout Cane, images of machines and factories always hint of decay or destruction. For Toomer, modern life — and particularly modern Southern rural life — was doomed unless humankind would turn its back on mindless industrialization and reclaim its humanity.

Bily, Cynthia A. “Reapers.” Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition. Jan. 2002. Literary

Reference Center. Web. 25 Aug. 2011.

16

On “I, too” - Sheri Metzger Karmiol

Karmiol has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature. She teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, and she is also a professional writer and the author of several reference texts on poetry and drama. In this essay, Karmiol discusses the role of poetry, particularly poems like "I, Too," in revealing truth and combating injustice and racism.

Poetry offers readers a multifaceted opportunity to experience the world in a different way. Poetry can create beauty. It can also be witty and entertaining, sometimes even comedic. But perhaps poetry's most important functions are to educate readers about injustice and to rouse readers to actions that can change the world. On occasion, poetry illuminates what is hidden, ignored, or just so distasteful that it is buried in the reader's unconscious mind. Throughout much of the twentieth century, racism was one of those topics that too few people discussed and that far too many people tolerated. Poetry is one tool that can lead to discussions about racism, and perhaps, to change. In his poetry, Langston Hughes is able to depict reality in such a way that readers emerge from their reading of his poetry with knowledge about a world they may not have directly experienced in their lives.

A quick and superficial reading of Hughes's "I, Too" leaves readers with the impression that the poet foresees a time when all Americans will sit together around a table, happy to be at last joined together in a nation in which white and black coexist harmoniously. The truth of the poem is more complex than this and requires that readers carefully consider Hughes's words. They reveal a deeper truth and a warning: once the black narrator has grown strong, whites will no longer dare to exclude him. The joining of black and white people envisioned in the poem is not a willing union, but one that occurs because black Americans will no longer tolerate segregation.

James Finn Cotter claims in his essay "The Truth of Poetry," published in The Hudson Review, that "the truth of poetry is not in reciting facts but in creating veracity." Poetry is not autocratic; rather it must create a reality that readers can locate in the images that the poet produces. This production of reality is even more important for poetry that seeks to expose injustice. Cotter explains that a poem must "be true to itself." A poem must be honest enough to "convince me and to capture my attention with its thought, emotion, imagery, and language." An honest poem leaves the reader feeling changed in some way, having experienced an awakening. An important function of poetry, according to Cotter, is to remind readers of "the injustices and stupidities of small-minded men,"who seek to keep other men in their "place." Poetry, then, does more than offer truth; it illuminates injustice and impeaches those who continue to endorse discrimination. This is what Hughes accomplishes in his image of two separate tables, one table defined by privilege and one table defined by injustice. Hughes is not satisfied to know his "place" and promises a fight when he is strong enough to seize what is rightfully his. "I, Too" reveals the truth about ending segregation—that joining together at one table would not be easy, but it would be deserved, as the last line of the poem promises.

When Hughes wrote "I, Too" in the 1920s the world was a long way from ending segregation, but the poet was able to imagine the day when that change would come. In Robert W. Blake's 1990 essay "Poets on Poetry: Writing and the Reconstruction of Reality," published in the English Journal, he claims that when a poet creates poetry, he or she "reconstructs Page 108  |

17

Top of Article reality." The poet uses his or her imagination to create a new reality for the reader. The hope and expectation is that eventually the imagined reality will become a new reality. This is also what Percy Bysshe Shelley argues in A Defense of Poetry, first published in 1840, when he claims that poetry does not simply reflect the world, it changes the world. Poetry makes things happen. When Hughes weaves his narrative about merging two separate Americas, one for blacks and one for whites, he is envisioning a future changed and a society created with equality for both races. When, at the end of "I, Too," black and white people sit together at the table, it is in the created world of the poet, one that he insists will align with reality. The creation of a new world is what Shelley emphasizes when he writes of the social importance of poetry, which plays upon the subconscious and thus can transcend ideology and can create "anew the universe," a universe without unjust laws. This is because, for Shelley, poets "are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society." Poetry is more than beauty, much more than just words; it is useful and beneficial to society because it removes distinctions like class, gender, and by extension, race. According to Shelley, a person must possess the ability to imagine the pain of others, to "put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own." Poetry allows readers to feel the pain of the poet—in this case, to experience the anguish of being excluded from the same world in which whites are given privilege and blacks are denied the same opportunities to succeed.

Poetry provides an opportunity for the reader to imagine another world. Hughes creates that kind of opportunity when he allows readers to imagine the pain of being excluded and then to see a tomorrow in which the poet will be included. Shelley claims that for a "man, to be greatly good, [he] must imagine intensely and comprehensively." The poet's ability, as defined by Shelley, is not only to behold "intensely the present at it is," or as it should be, according to moral laws, but to hold forth the promise of "the future in the present." The poet allows readers to envision a better world, in which an unjust world can be changed, just as Hughes does in "I, Too." Because selfish men are reluctant to change unjust laws, poetry is, as Shelley claims, "never more to be desired than at periods" when "an excess of selfish and calculating principle" exceeds the laws of human nature. It is the poet who fulfills the need for change by creating poetry that illuminates the injustice of the world and the need for a better world. The poet, then, is the bridge from inhumanity to humanity.

The poet's ability to use his art to expose the truth is perhaps his greatest obligation. Poetry is in the unique position of being able to tell the truth, even when the truth might be unpleasant or even dangerous. Not all readers take the time to understand the nuances of poetry; therefore, the poet is sometimes able to cleverly disguise meaning, using the language of poetry. The meaning can be confused and explained away as simply a poem misunderstood. For example, Andrew Marvell did this in his poem, "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland." Because the ode is a poetic form used to celebrate greatness, it is not immediately clear to the reader that Marvell is being sarcastic in his faint praise of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. The Horatian ode, in particular, is reserved for praising and honoring a great man. However, in this ode Marvell compares Cromwell to Caesar, who was assassinated as a tyrant. Marvell's depiction of the deposed King Charles I, as he meets his death on the scaffold, is one of noble kingship. Cromwell might have been confused about whether Marvell was praising him, but scholars who dissect the poem know that Marvell was doing quite the opposite. Since Marvell did not lose his head over his ode, presumably Cromwell did not probe the poem's

18

truth too closely. In his essay, Blake argues that "poetry is for telling people what they hadn't noticed or thought about before." Poetry brings injustice into public view and exposes the inequities of human existence. Whether in exposing a tyrant for the murder of a king or in exposing prejudice, poets use words, says Blake, to "reveal what people and living creatures are really like." Readers can see the truth and the injustice in Hughes's words. Therefore they can also envision the need to change the world.

In The Defence of Poesy, sixteenth-century poet Sir Philip Sidney defends the work of poets to the Puritan writer Stephen Gosson who, in his 1579 text Schoole of Abuse, argues that poetry is a waste of time, that it is composed of lies, and that it teaches sinful practices. Sidney's response to these claims argues that the role of literature in a civilized society is to educate and to inspire people to undertake ethical and virtuous actions. It is also the hope four hundred years later. Hughes wrote "I, Too" after being denied several opportunities in Genoa, Italy, to board ships bound for the United States. White crews did not want to work with a black man. "I, Too" is a testimony to the need for change, for all humankind to recognize the rights of others. The best way to comprehend this need for change is to visualize a world in which equality is denied. In an essay for the English Journal that argues for the importance of reading modern poetry, Virginia M. Schauble suggests that poetry "can actually be a voice of rare clarity." Poetry allows readers to experience a world they have never known, a world in which people are oppressed and denied basic human rights. In her essay, "Reading American Modernist Poetry with High-School Seniors," Schauble points out that poetry's value "is not merely aesthetic"; instead, poetry "speaks a word counter to cultural expectations." It forces readers to think about difference and about changing the world. Poetry creates change and, as Sidney argued so many centuries earlier, it urges readers to ethical actions.

Poetry has an important role in the modern world, just as it did in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries when Sidney and Shelley each argued so eloquently for its worth in their worlds, which were also filled with conflict and injustice. Poetry can teach readers about truth, but it can also teach readers about the difference between right and wrong. Poetry can create the expectation of change and the desire to make that change real. Most importantly, poetry is a way to learn the truth about the world we live in. "I, Too" both reveals injustice and offers the promise of change. As such, the poem inspired black readers in Hughes's day to anticipate the day when they too would join their brethren at the American table. For those who endorsed segregation, it issued a warning that they dare not resist this change.

Metzger Karmiol, Sheri. "I Too." Poetry for Students, Vol. 30. 2009. Gale Virtual Reference

Library. Web. 12 Oct. 2010.

19

Harlem Renaissance Poetry and Literary Criticism

Read the poem twice with your group, annotating your initial analysis and reactions Use the questions below as a guide to deeper analysis. Be prepared to share your analysis and that of the critics with the entire class.

1. Who is the speaker of the poem? What evidence supports your determination?

2. Identify poetic devices that are employed.

3. Is there anything significant about the diction? Any surprising or unexpected words or use of words?

4. Structure: What is significant about the poem’s rhyme scheme, stanzaic pattern, or other structural elements?

5. What is the theme of the poem? Remember to state the theme in broad terms that can apply to the poem and the world at large.

6. What elements of the critic’s analysis provide the greatest insight, context, and analysis? Are there elements of the criticism that you disagree with? Why?

20