Fifty years & Other Poems

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James Weldon Johnson. Fifty years & Other Poems

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

INTRODUCTION

FIFTY YEARS & OTHER POEMS

FIFTY YEARS

TO AMERICA

O BLACK AND UNKNOWN BARDS

O SOUTHLAND!

To HORACE BUMSTEAD

THE COLOR SERGEANT

THE BLACK MAMMY

FATHER, FATHER ABRAHAM

BROTHERS

FRAGMENT

THE WHITE WITCH

MOTHER NIGHT

THE YOUNG WARRIOR

THE GLORY OF THE DAY WAS IN HER FACE

SONNET

FROM THE SPANISH

FROM THE GERMAN OF UHLAND

BEFORE A PAINTING

I HEAR THE STARS STILL SINGING

GIRL OF FIFTEEN

THE SUICIDE

DOWN BY THE CARIB SEA

I. Sunrise in the Tropics

II. Los Cigarillos

III. Teestay

IV. The Lottery Girl

V. The Dancing Girl

VI. Sunset in the Tropics

AND THE GREATEST OF THESE IS WAR

A MID-DAY DREAMER

THE TEMPTRESS

GHOSTS OF THE OLD YEAR

THE GHOST OF DEACON BROWN

"LAZY"

OMAR

DEEP IN THE QUIET WOOD

VOLUPTAS

THE WORD OF AN ENGINEER

LIFE

SLEEP

PRAYER AT SUNRISE

THE GIFT TO SING

MORNING, NOON AND NIGHT

HER EYES TWIN POOLS

THE AWAKENING

BEAUTY THAT IS NEVER OLD

VENUS IN A GARDEN

VASHTI

THE REWARD

JINGLES & CROONS

SENCE YOU WENT AWAY

MA LADY'S LIPS AM LIKE DE HONEY

TUNK

NOBODY'S LOOKIN' BUT DE OWL AND DE MOON

YOU'S SWEET TO YO' MAMMY JES DE SAME

A PLANTATION BACCHANAL

JULY IN GEORGY

A BANJO SONG

ANSWER TO PRAYER

DAT GAL O' MINE

THE SEASONS

'POSSUM SONG

BRER RABBIT, YOU'S DE CUTES' OF 'EM ALL

AN EXPLANATION

DE LITTLE PICKANINNY'S GONE TO SLEEP

THE RIVALS

Отрывок из книги

For permission to reprint certain poems in this book thanks are due to the editors and proprietors of the Century Magazine, the Independent, The Crisis, The New York Times, and the following copyright holders, G. Ricordi and Company, G. Schirmer and Company, and Joseph W. Stern and Company.

When we take stock of ourselves these ten millions cannot be left out of account. Yet they are not as we are; they stand apart, more or less; they have their own distinct characteristics. It behooves us to understand them as best we can and to discover what manner of people they are. And we are justified in inquiring how far they have revealed themselves, their racial characteristics, their abiding traits, their longing aspirations,—how far have they disclosed these in one or another of the several arts. They have had their poets, their painters, their composers, and yet most of these have ignored their racial opportunity and have worked in imitation and in emulation of their white predecessors and contemporaries, content to handle again the traditional themes. The most important and the most significant contributions they have made to art are in music,—first in the plaintive beauty of the so-called "Negro spirituals"—and, secondly, in the syncopated melody of so-called "ragtime" which has now taken the whole world captive.

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In poetry, especially in the lyric, wherein the soul is free to find full expression for its innermost emotions, their attempts have been, for the most part, divisible into two classes. In the first of these may be grouped the verses in which the lyrist put forth sentiments common to all mankind and in no wise specifically those of his own race; and from the days of Phyllis Wheatley to the present the most of the poems written by men who were not wholly white are indistinguishable from the poems written by men who were wholly white. Whatever their merits might be, these verses cast little or no light upon the deeper racial sentiments of the people to whom the poets themselves belonged. But in the lyrics to be grouped in the second of these classes there was a racial quality. This contained the dialect verses in which there was an avowed purpose of recapturing the color, the flavor, the movement of life in "the quarters," in the cotton field and in the canebrake. Even in this effort, white authors had led the way; Irvin Russell and Joel Chandler Harris had made the path straight for Paul Laurence Dunbar, with his lilting lyrics, often infused with the pathos of a down-trodden folk.

In the following pages Mr. James Weldon Johnson conforms to both of these traditions. He gathers together a group of lyrics, delicate in workmanship, fragrant with sentiment, and phrased in pure and unexceptionable English. Then he has another group of dialect verses, racy of the soil, pungent in flavor, swinging in rhythm and adroit in rhyme. But where he shows himself a pioneer is the half-dozen larger and bolder poems, of a loftier strain, in which he has been nobly successful in expressing the higher aspirations of his own people. It is in uttering this cry for recognition, for sympathy, for understanding, and above all, for justice, that Mr. Johnson is most original and most powerful. In the superb and soaring stanzas of "Fifty Years" (published exactly half-a-century after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation) he has given us one of the noblest commemorative poems yet written by any American,—a poem sonorous in its diction, vigorous in its workmanship, elevated in its imagination and sincere in its emotion. In it speaks the voice of his race; and the race is fortunate in its spokesman. In it a fine theme has been finely treated. In it we are made to see something of the soul of the people who are our fellow citizens now and forever,—even if we do not always so regard them. In it we are glad to acclaim a poem which any living poet might be proud to call his own.

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