Chapter II · THE PRESENT RENAISSANCE OF THE NEGRO (continued 2)
Reading edition
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.
A sonnet entitled To a Caged Canary in a Negro Restaurant will present the poet’s people with the persuasiveness of pathos as the foregoing poem with the persuasiveness of reason:
Thou little golden bird of happy song! A cage cannot restrain the rapturous joy Which thou dost shed abroad. Thou dost employ Thy bondage for high uses. Grievous wrong Is thine; yet in thy heart glows full and strong The tropic sun, though far beyond thy flight, And though thou flutterest there by day and night Above the clamor of a dusky throng. So let my will, albeit hedged about By creed and caste, feed on the light within; So let my song sing through the bars of doubt With light and healing where despair has been; So let my people bide their time and place, A hindered but a sunny-hearted race.
It would be an injustice to this poet did I convey the idea that his seventy-odd poems are exclusively occupied with race wrongs and oppression. Not a few of them bear no stamp of an oppressed or afflicted spirit, though of sorrow they may have been nurtured.
A lyric of pure loveliness is the following, entitled
TO A NOBLY-GIFTED SINGER
All the pleasance of her face Telleth of an inward grace; In her dark eyes I have seen Sorrows of the Nazarene; In the proud and perfect mould Of her body I behold, Rounded in a single view, The good, the beautiful, the true; And when her spirit goes up-winging On sweet airs of artless singing, Surely the heavenly spheres rejoice In union with a kindred voice.
Schoolmaster I said Mr. Hill was. To represent his didactic quality, not his purer lyrical note, nor yet his narrative beauty, I choose the following piece:
SELF-DETERMINATION
The Philosophy of the American Negro
Four things we will not do, in spite of all That demons plot for our decline and fall; We bring four benedictions which the meek Unto the proud are privileged to speak, Four gifts by which amidst all stern-browed races We move with kindly hearts and shining faces. We will not hate. Law, custom, creed and caste, All notwithstanding, here we hold us fast. Down through the years the mighty ships of state Have all been broken on the rocks of hate. We will not cease to laugh and multiply. We slough off trouble, and refuse to die. The Indian stood unyielding, stark and grim; We saw him perish, and we learned of him To mix a grain of philosophic mirth With all the crass injustices of earth. We will not use the ancient carnal tools. These never won, yet centuries of schools, Of priests, and all the work of brush and pen Have not availed to win the wisest men From futile faith in battleship and shell: We see them fall, and mark that folly well. We will not waver in our loyalty. No strange voice reaches us across the sea; No crime at home shall stir us from this soil. Ours is the guerdon, ours the blight of toil, But raised above it by a faith sublime We choose to suffer here and bide our time. And if we hold to this, we dream some day Our countrymen will follow in our way.
But though teacher Leslie Pinckney Hill is singer too. And though he has a message for America he also has music. His powers are rich, varied, cultured, and developing. His second book will be better than his excellent first.