Category: Seasons

Categories
1910s African American Poem Seasons Trees

Hope

Hope

Mary Betsy Totten. Rising Sun. Quilt, 1825-1835, National Museum of American History. Gift of Mrs. Marvel Mildred Matthes. Public domain.
By Georgia Douglas Johnson
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Frail children of sorrow, dethroned by a hue,
The shadows are flecked by the rose sifting through,
The world has its motion, all things pass away,
No night is omnipotent, there must be day,

The oak tarries long in the depth of the seed,[1]
But swift is the season of nettle and weed.
Abide yet awhile in the mellowing shade
And rise with the hour for which you were made.

The cycle of seasons, the tidals of man,
Revolve in the coil of an infinite plan,
We move to the rhythm of ages long done,
And each has an hour--to dwell in the sun!
JOHNSON, GEORGIA DOUGLAS. “HOPE.” THE CRISIS’ 14, NO. 6 (OCTOBER 1917): 293.

[1] Oak acorns exhibit dormancy, which means they germinate slowly or not at all after they drop from the tree. These seeds can remain inactive on the ground from August or September of any given year until the next spring.

Contexts

Starting in 1912, the October issues of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, were dedicated to children. A typical edition of these children’s numbers would contain a special editorial piece and two or three literary works specifically for children, while still including the serious pieces about contemporary issues with a focus on race that The Crisis was known for. These October numbers were sprinkled with children’s photographs sent in by the readers.

In his first editorial for the Children’s number in 1912, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that “there is a sense in which all numbers and all words of a magazine of ideas myst point to the child—to that vast immortality and wide sweep and infinite possibility which the child represents.”

The success of The Crisis’ children’s number led to the standalone The Brownies’ Book, a monthly magazine for African American children that circulated from January 1920 to December 1921 under the editorship of Du Bois, Augustus Granville Dill, and Jessie Fauset.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

flecked: Of darkness: Dappled with bright spots. Of the sky: Dappled with clouds. Of clouds: Cast like flecks over the sky.

nettle: Any of various plants with inconspicuous green flowers and (usually) stinging hairs that constitute the genus Urtica (family Urticaceae); esp. the Eurasian plant U. dioica, which has strongly toothed ovate leaves and is an abundant weed of damp waste ground, roadsides, etc. (also called (common) stinging nettle). Also (usually with distinguishing word): any of various plants of other genera and families with stinging hairs.

omnipotent: All-powerful, having absolute power. Also: having unlimited or great authority, force, or influence; extremely strong.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

In her 2017 poetry book One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance, poet Nikki Grimes uses Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Hope” to create a golden shovel poem titled “On Bully Patrol.” Golden shovel poetry is a poetic form created by Terrance Hayes in 2010 that uses each word of an existing poem as the last word of the successive lines of a new poem.

Categories
1910s African American Poem Seasons

O Autumn, Autumn!

O Autumn, Autumn!

By Mary Effie Lee
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
William Henry Holmes. Autumn Tangle. Watercolor, 1920, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Florence Deakins Becker. Public domain. 
O Autumn, Autumn! O pensive light and wistful sound!
Gold-haunted sky, green-haunted ground!
When, wan, the dead leaves flutter by
Deserted realms of butterfly!
When robins band themselves together
To seek the soul of sun-steeped weather;
And all of summer’s largesse goes
For lands of olive and the rose!
LEE, MARY EFFIE. “O AUTUMN, AUTUMN!” THE CRISIS 16, NO. 6 (OCTOBER 1918): 269.

Contexts

Mary Effie Lee kept contributing to The Crisis as Mary Lee Newsome after her wedding to Rev. H. N. Newsome of Selma, Alabama, in 1920. She was one of the African American poets who wrote primarily for children. The Envious Lobster also contains selections from Gladiola Garden, her one volume of poetry.

Starting in 1912, the October issues of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, were dedicated to children. A typical edition of these children’s numbers would contain a special editorial piece and two or three literary works specifically for children, while still including the serious pieces about contemporary issues with a focus on race that The Crisis was known for. These October numbers were sprinkled with children’s photographs sent in by the readers.

In his first editorial for the Children’s number in 1912, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that “there is a sense in which all numbers and all words of a magazine of ideas myst point to the child—to that vast immortality and wide sweep and infinite possibility which the child represents.”

The success of The Crisis’ children’s number led to the standalone The Brownies’ Book, a monthly magazine for African American children that circulated from January 1920 to December 1921 under the editorship of Du Bois, Augustus Granville Dill, and Jessie Fauset.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

  • haunted: Frequented or much visited by spirits, imaginary beings, apparitions, spectres, etc.
  • largesse: The willingness to spend freely; (the virtue of) generosity; liberality, munificence.
  • wan: Lacking light, or lustre; dark-hued, dusky, gloomy, dark. Obsolete. Chiefly poetic.

Categories
1890s Life and Death Poem Seasons Trees

Among the Leaves

Among the Leaves

By Ethelwyn Wetherald
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Hans Andersen Brendekilde, Wooded Path in Autumn. Oil painting, c. 1902. Public Domain.
The near sky, the under sky,
    The low sky that I love!
I lie where fallen leaves lie,
    With a leafy sky above;	
And draw the colored leaves nigh,
And push the withered leaves by,
And feel the woodland heart upon me
	brooding like a dove.

The bright sky, the shifting sky,
    The sky that Autumn weaves!
I see where scarlet leaves fly
    The sky the wind bereaves;
I see the ling’ring leaves die,
I hear the dying leaves sigh,
And breathe the woodland breath made
	sweet of all her withered leaves.
Wetherald, Ethelwyn. “Among the Leaves.” Youth’s Companion (October 17, 1895): 490.

Contexts

Based in Boston, the long-lived Youth’s Companion was at one time among America’s most popular children’s magazines. Famous writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, and Booker T. Washington all published in its well-thumbed pages. Among its avid readers was a young Robert Frost. It helped popularize The Pledge of Allegiance, publishing it in its September 8, 1892 issue.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary

nigh: near

bereaves: to rob; to deprive of anything valued; to leave destitute, orphaned, or widowed [here, by implication, to sadden]

Resources for Further Study
  • “Category: Youth’s Companion.” Wikimedia Commons. This page has some illustrations from the magazine.
  • Chris [last name unknown]. “The Youth’s Companion.” This blog has numerous issues, with pictures. The most recent blog pages feature the 1920s.
  • Pflieger, Pat. “Youth’s Companion (1827-1929).” Nineteenth-Century American Children and What They Read.
  • “The Youth’s Companion.” The Online Books Page. University of Pennsylvania. You can read other selections from the magazine here through HathiTrust (the interface is not particularly user-friendly).
Contemporary Connections

Readers today still value what original readers often called “The Companion.” See Vintage American Ways (a site with some errors, including the magazine’s dates).

“A History of The Youth’s Companion and Pledge of Allegiance with collectors’ notes” on the Collecting Old Magazines site highlights how the issues that contain Emily Dickinson’s poetry and The Pledge of Allegiance are valuable. (this site also has errors, and it misleadingly presents the magazine as “boring.”)

Categories
1940s African American Poem Seasons Trees

Quilting Bee

Quilting Bee

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Modern pieced fabric quilt. Courtesy QuiltWoman.com.
Sometimes I play that in the spring
The woods get scalloped scraps of green,
And set the trees to gay quilting,[1]
Making a merry, gorgeous scene,
A sight I like to look up to—
The sky helps piece the quilt with blue.

Then there’s a change when autumn’s back,
The green scraps turn to gold and red.
The dark twigs stitch them still with black,
But there’re more blue scraps overhead,
And soon the whole quilt’s all blue-gray—
The brighter scraps get blown away.

And now I play each empty tree
Is left there from the quilting bee.
They can’t get home—so bent and old
Out there with bare hands in the cold
To wait for spring and gay green scraps
To fill their old lean hands and laps.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “Quilting Bee.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 125.

[1] A quilting bee is a traditional community activity where a group of people gather to sew together squares (or other pieces) of fabric to form a quilt. The bee would also help sew together the top (pieced) section, a filling (such as a sheet of cotton batting), and a backing fabric. Newsome imagines the sky and trees as pieces in a quilt that her poem stitches together. Unlike a cloth quilt, nature’s “quilt” changes as the seasons change.

Contexts

Newsome worked among the many celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anne Spencer, many of them poets. Among her noteworthy contributions to that movement was her writing and editing for W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). As John Claborn points out, Du Bois’s political goals embraced the idea of access to natural spaces, and the magazine featured environmental writing by such notable authors as Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Hughes. Newsome contributed to and edited “The Little Page” (“Whimsies for the Younger Folk”), where much of her work emphasized nature. This poem, like many others in The Envious Lobster, uses the community activity of quilting to teach a natural history lesson.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Anonymous. Reading of Newsome’s poem, “The Bronze Legacy.” The illustrations for Gladiola Garden were done by prominent Black artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

Johnston, Amber O’Neal. “African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome. Heritage Mom blog.

One of the best-known quilting groups today is the community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

Contemporary fabric quilt. Artist Unknown.
Categories
1910s Birds Native American Poem Seasons

To the Indian Meadow Lark

To the Indian Meadow Lark

By Alexander Posey (Muskogee Creek)
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Eastern Meadow Lark. Colored lithograph, 1919, by Louis Agassiz. Public Domain.
When other birds despairing southward fly
	In early autumn time away,
When all the green leaves of the forest die,
	How merry still art thou and gay.[1]

O golden breasted bird of dawn,
Through all the bleak days singing on,
Till winter, woo a captive by thy strain,
Breaks into smiles and spring is come again.
Posey, Alexander. “To the Indian Meadow Lark.” Indian School Journal 6, no. 10 (April 1910): 30.

[1] The Indian meadow lark is likely the Western Meadowlark, a year-round resident of Posey’s Oklahoma home. The Eastern Meadow Lark is similar in appearance, but its songs differ.

Contexts

The Indian School Journal was the official publication for the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School (also known as the Haworth Institute, the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, and the Chilocco Indian School). Located in north-central Oklahoma near the Kansas border, it began taking students in 1884, enrolling 150 from seventeen tribes that first year. Enrollment had more than doubled by 1895, with students coming from various tribes, including the Cherokee, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Pawnee tribes. The Oklahoma Historical Society notes that “significant enrollment from the so-called ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ did not occur until after 1910 but by 1925, Cherokee constituted the largest single tribal affiliation at the school (26 percent of approximately nine hundred students).” Following World War II and the expansion of public education, the school enrolled mostly students who lacked access to such education.

Like most federally funded Indian schools, Chilocco sought to assimilate Native children into white society. Also like other schools, it stressed “industrial” education—manual and domestic labor—over academic pursuits, aiming to train them as workers for white families. Education at Chilocco was notably militaristic; students attended weekly Christian religious services, also intended to weaken their ties to family and tribe. In the 1950s, student numbers peaked at around 1300, and the school closed in 1980. Muskogee Creek poet, journalist, and humorist Alexander Posey was a nationally known writer whose appearance in the school’s magazine suggests his powerful influence on young Native American readers. Following his tragic death by drowning in the Oktahutchee River when he was only 34 years old—and only a few months after The Indian School Journal published several poems—his wife Minnie collected his work in The Poems of Alexander Lawrence Posey. His evocative poetry is also available through the Academy of American Poets (poets.org) and The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. The Envious Lobster uses the versions Posey published in the school’s magazine.

Resources for Further Study
  • Archuleta, Margaret L., Brenda J. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima (Mvskoke/Creek Nation of Eastern Oklahoma, not enrolled), eds. Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879-2000.
  • Connelley, William Elsey. “Memoir or Alexander Lawrence Posey.” In The Poems of Alexander Lawrence Posey. Ed. Mrs. Minnie H. Posey. Topeka, KS: Crane and Company, 1910. Pp. 5-65.
  • Higgs, Richard. “The Oktahutchee Claims One of Its Own.” This Land, April 10, 2013.
  • Littlefield, Daniel F. Jr. Alexander Posey: Creek Poet, Journalist, and Humorist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
  • Lomawaima, K. Tsianina (Mvskoke/Creek Nation of Eastern Oklahoma, not enrolled). “Chilocco Indian Agricultural School.” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Oklahoma Historical Society.
  • Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. (Mvskoke/Creek Nation of Eastern Oklahoma, not enrolled). They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (1995).
  • Wilson, Linda D. “Posey, Alexander Lawrence (1873-1908).” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.
Contemporary Connections

“At Length with K. Tsianina Lomawaima.” At Length with Steve Scher. February 10, 2016.

“Chilocco Through the Years.” Firethief Productions. Chilocco History Project, August 2, 2019.

Douglas, Crystal. “A Look at the Chilocco Indian School.” The Kaw Nation: People of the Southwind. Fife, Ari. “At one former Native American School in Oklahoma, honoring the dead now falls to alumni.” The Frontier, July 21, 2021.

Categories
1880s Birds Dialogue Native American Poem Seasons

The Seasons

The Seasons

By Anonymous
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Indian Canoe Parade in Tulalip Bay, c.1912. Photo. Ferdinand Brady. Courtesy University of Washington Libraries.
	MARY.
How I love the blooming Spring,
When the birds so gayly sing!

	JOHN.
More the Summer me delights,
With its lovely days and nights.

	EMELY.
Autumn is the best of all,
With its fruits for great and small.

	RICHARD.
Nay! old Winter is the time!
Jolly then the sleigh-bells’ chime!

	GRANDMOTHER.
Every season will be bright,
Children, if you’ll live aright.
Anonymous. “The Seasons.” The Youth’s Companion 14, no. 2 (July 1882): n.p.

Contexts

Begun in 1881, The Youth’s Companion—a name that many nineteenth-century publications shared—was a monthly student magazine that published articles written by pupils of the Catholic-run boarding school located on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. A federally recognized tribe located in the mid-Puget Sound area, the Tulalip Tribes received reservation lands—22,000 acres—in 1855, with its legal boundaries established by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1873. According to the Tulalip Tribes website, “it was created to provide a permanent home for the Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skagit, Suiattle, Samish, and Stillaguamish Tribes and allied bands living in the region.”

Nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools aimed to assimilate Native Americans into white culture. They separated children from their families, required students to dress like white Americans, and prohibited them from speaking their language. They also emphasized so-called “industrial” training: boys learned agricultural and industrial skills, while girls learned how to cook, sew, and clean a household. Students were often expected to become servants or to provide manual labor help for whites.

Like many contributions to Native American student periodicals, this poem was published anonymously. Students living on reservations during this time often received educations governed by white religious authorities who emphasized moral training. Student newspapers frequently published work by students, but it’s often difficult to identify authorship even if contributions included the author’s name. The moral that ends the sketch may be an addition by one of the school’s teachers.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

“Tulalip History Minute 04—The Tulalip Indian School presented by Mary Jane Topash,” the Tulalip History Project. Provides Tulalip-sponsored background on the tribe.

“Editorial: Getting to the truth of Tulalip boarding school,” September 26, 2021, HeraldNet (Everett, Washington). Caution: includes information about abuses at the school.

Categories
1880s Birds Farm life Native American Poem Seasons

Spring’s Return

Spring’s Return

By Anonymous
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Tulalip Indian School and Bandstand, 1910 photo.
Tulalip Indian School and Bandstand, 1910. Photograph. Ferdinand Brady. Courtesy UW Special Collections (NA1464).
Icy winter has departed,
	And the balmy spring has come,
The birds sing forth their melody,
	And the bees begin to hum.

The bobolink now sounds his note,[1]
	His song so clear and sweet,
He tells us of the balmy spring,
	We’ve longed so much to greet.

The fields have changed their dark gray robe
	For one of loveliest green, 
And on the hills and in the vales
	The flocks and herds are seen.

Out on the fresh green sward
	The hen now leads her tender brood, 
And seeks for them with anxious care
	The choicest bits of food.

The gentle river now is studded
	With many a white-sailed craft,
That swiftly o’er its bosom
	The genial breezes waft.

But summer soon will come,
	And to us she will bring
More blessings and more pleasures
	Than did the welcome spring.

Now let us well remember,
	That their beauty cannot last,
For when cometh bleak December,
	He’ll destroy it with his blast.
Anonymous. “Spring’s Return.” The Youth’s Companion 11, no. 1 (April 1882): 272.

[1] Notable for its song, the Bobolink is a black and white bird with a yellow “cap.” ItDuring migration it occupies much of the southeastern quarter of the United States, and it summers (and breeds) in the U.S. Northeast, upper Midwest, and much of southern Canada. It rarely appears in the Tulalip region. Mentioning the bird here suggests that a teacher who came from the eastern part of the country may have described it to the author, or that the author read about it.

Contexts

Begun in 1881, The Youth’s Companion—a name that many nineteenth-century publications shared—was a monthly student magazine that published articles written by pupils of the Catholic-run boarding school located on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. A federally recognized tribe located in the mid-Puget Sound area, the Tulalip Tribes received reservation lands—22,000 acres—in 1855, with its legal boundaries established by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1873. According to the Tulalip Tribes website, “it was created to provide a permanent home for the Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skagit, Suiattle, Samish, and Stillaguamish Tribes and allied bands living in the region.”

Nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools aimed to assimilate Native Americans into white culture. They separated children from their families, required students to dress like white Americans, and prohibited them from speaking their language. They also emphasized so-called “industrial” training: boys learned agricultural and industrial skills, while girls learned how to cook, sew, and clean a household. Students were often expected to become servants or to provide manual labor help for whites.

Like many contributions to Native American student periodicals, this poem was published anonymously.Students living on reservations during this time often received educations governed by white religious authorities who emphasized moral training. In describing the spring, this poem mirrors much of the nineteenth century’s natural history writing for children. Its emphasis on agriculture indirectly demonstrates the U.S. official policy of eliminating these tribes’ traditional lifeways of fishing, hunting, and gathering.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

“Tulalip History Minute 04—The Tulalip Indian School presented by Mary Jane Topash,” the Tulalip History Project. Provides Tulalip-sponsored background on the tribe.

“Editorial: Getting to the truth of Tulalip boarding school,” September 26, 2021, HeraldNet (Everett, Washington). Caution: includes information about abuses at the school.

Categories
1880s Essay Farm life Harvest Native American Seasons Sketch

The Four Seasons

The Four Seasons

By William Lear
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
The Four Seasons, by William Clarke Rice. Oil on fabric, 1923. Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Spring is a very lovely season. Everybody delights to be out doors, to enjoy the pure air. In the fields some of the farmers are plowing, others are sowing their crops or preparing the ground for their vegetables. We see the birds in the trees flying about. They seem very happy, and are singing their sweetest songs. In the woods spring up beautiful wild flowers which we pick, some for our church, and others for our little oratory of St. Aloysius in our schoolroom.[1]

Then summer comes; it is the hottest of all the seasons. The berries are ripe and people, old and young, are picking them for their use. When it is very hot, no one likes to work outside in the sun, but the hay and grain must be cut and stored away. This is a very busy season for farmers.

After this we have autumn. The heat of the summer is gone, and we must now provide wood and fill up our sheds as much as we can, to keep us warm in the cold winter days, for we already feel the cold a little in the morning. Besides this we gather our vegetables and fruits, and keep them in a safe place, but sometimes the rats and mice have a good time with them.

Now comes the terrible and dreaded winter. How we like to have warm clothes, and fire is a precious thing. But there are many poor people who have no homes, and no fire to keep them warm. On the western coast of North America the winters are milder than on the eastern coast. We have snow in December and January. It does not stay long, but people make good use of it while it lasts.

Lear, William. “The Four Seasons.” The Youth’s Companion 6, no. 1 (November 1881): 143.

[1] St. Aloysius (1568-1591) was an Italian-born nobleman who relinquished his wealth to become a Jesuit priest in the Roman Catholic church. White religious leaders considered him to be an important spiritual model for students in the Tulalip Indian School.

Contexts

Begun in 1881, The Youth’s Companion—a name that many nineteenth-century publications shared—was a monthly student magazine that published articles written by pupils of the Catholic-run boarding school located on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. A federally recognized tribe located in the mid-Puget Sound area, the Tulalip Tribes received reservation lands—22,000 acres—in 1855, with its legal boundaries established by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1873. According to the Tulalip Tribes website, “it was created to provide a permanent home for the Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skagit, Suiattle, Samish, and Stillaguamish Tribes and allied bands living in the region.”

Nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools aimed to assimilate Native Americans into white culture. They separated children from their families, required students to dress like white Americans, and prohibited them from speaking their language. They also emphasized so-called “industrial” training: boys learned agricultural and industrial skills, while girls learned how to cook, sew, and clean a household. Students were often expected to become servants or to provide manual labor help for whites.

Unlike many contributions to Native American student periodicals, this conversation was published with an author’s name. William Lear (Lummi) appears in the 1885-1940 Native American Census Rolls in 1901, when he was thirty-six, so he would have been about fifteen when he composed “The Four Seasons.” He was the father of thirteen-year-old Clara and fifteen-year-old Florance, who are listed in 1910 school census. Students living on reservations during this time often received educations governed by white religious authorities who emphasized moral training. In describing the seasons, this story mirrors much of the nineteenth century’s natural history writing for children. The sketch of winter veers from convention, focusing on the region’s poverty and ending with a hint of pleasure.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

“Tulalip History Minute 04—The Tulalip Indian School presented by Mary Jane Topash,” the Tulalip History Project. Provides Tulalip-sponsored background on the tribe.

“Editorial: Getting to the truth of Tulalip boarding school,” September 26, 2021, HeraldNet (Everett, Washington). Caution: includes information about abuses at the school.

urrent significance.

Categories
1870s Birds Poem Seasons

Little Green Hummer

Little Green Hummer

By Mary Mapes Dodge
Annotations by Mary Miller/KK
Bird and Nest. From Dodge, Mary Mapes. “Little Green Hummer.” In Rhymes and Jingles. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1875. Public domain.

Little green Hummer
Was born in the summer;
His coat was as bright
As the emerald’s light.
Short was his song,
Though his bill it was long;
His weight altogether
Not more than a feather.
From dipping his head
In the sunset red,
And gilding his side
In its fiery tide,
He gleamed like a jewel,
And darted around,
‘Twixt sunlight and starlight,
Ne’er touching the ground.
Now over a blossom,
Now under, now in it;
Here, there, and everywhere,
All in a minute.
Ah! never he cared
Who wondered and stared,—
His life was completeness
Of pleasure and sweetness;
He revelled in lightness,
In fleetness and brightness
This sweet little Hummer
That came with the summer.

Dodge, Mary Mapes. “Little Green Hummer.” In Rhymes and Jingles, 14. New York: Scribner, Armstrong and  Company, 1875.

Contexts

Mary Mapes Dodge (1831-1905) was born in 1831 in New York. She made her most significant contribution to the body of late nineteenth and twentieth-century children’s literature and childhood education with her work as an editor of St. Nicholas Magazine. The magazine published poems, stories, and educational articles for children, and by children, on topics ranging from history to science to nature. Contributors included luminaries such as Louisa May Alcott, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. The magazine remains a rich source of insight into the education of children during that era.

Of particular interest is the “St. Nicholas League” section of submissions from readers. Works included sketches, paintings, photographs, poems, and stories. The editors recognized the best works with awards and prizes. Several famous writers were first published in the magazine, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. B. White, and Bennet Cerf. St. Nicholas was in circulation from 1873 to 1943, and Dodge remained as editor until her death in 1905.

Dodge also worked as an associate editor for Hearth and Home magazine alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe. Like many nineteenth-century writers, Stowe was also fascinated hummingbirds. Search for her sketch, “Hum, the Son of Buz,” elsewhere in The Envious Lobster.

Resources for Further Study
Contemporary Connections

Climate change is threatening hummingbirds by disrupting their patterns of migration and feeding routines. As bloom times change they may arrive at a known source of nutrition too early or too late. In short, they have become out of synch with nature. Scientists are still studying the problem and possible remedies, but you can help by turning your home into a hummingbird haven and following other tips in the article “Turn Your Yard Into A Hummingbird Spectacular,” published in Audubon Magazine.

Categories
1920s African American Poem Seasons

Rondeau

Rondeau

By Jessie Fauset
Annotations by Rene Marzuk
Robert S. Duncanson. Valley Pasture. Oil on canvas, 1857, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Melvin and H. Alan Frank from the Frank Family Collection. Public domain.
When April’s here and meadows wide
Once more with spring’s sweet growths are pied,
        I close each book, drop each pursuit,
        And past the brook, no longer mute,
I joyous roam the countryside.

Look, here the violets shy abide
And there the mating robins hide—
        How keen my senses, how acute,
                When April’s here!

And list! down where the shimmering tide
Hard by that farthest hill doth glide,
Rise faint sweet strains from shepherd’s flute,
        Pan’s pipes and Berecynthian lute.[1]
Each sight, each sound fresh joys provide
                When April’s here.
Fauset, Jessie. “Rondeau,” IN THE UPWARD PATH: A READER FOR COLORED CHILDREN, ED. MYRON T. PRITCHARD AND MARY WHITE OVINGTON, 120. HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, 1920.

[1] Berecynthos was a place in Phrygia, an ancient Anatolia district. An 1863 translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid includes the lines: “The timbrels and the Berecynthian lute / Of the Idaean mother summon you.”

Contexts

“Rondeau” was included in The Upward Path: A Reader for Colored Children, published in 1920 and compiled by Myron T. Pritchard and Mary White Ovington. The volume’s foreword states that, “to the present time, there has been no collection of stories and poems by Negro writers, which colored children could read with interest and pleasure and in which they could find a mirror of the traditions and aspirations of their race.”

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

  • lute: A stringed musical instrument, much in vogue from the 14th to the 17th centuries, the strings of which are struck with the fingers of the right hand and stopped on the frets with those of the left.
  • Pan: [The name of] the god of flocks and herds of Greek mythology, usually represented with the horns, ears, and legs of a goat on the body of a man.
  • rondeau: A short poem of medieval French origin, normally consisting of thirteen octosyllabic lines, in which only two rhymes are employed throughout and with the opening words used twice as a refrain. This poem is written in this verse form.
Resources for Further Study
  • Fauset was the literary editor of The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine, from 1919 to 1926. In this role, she championed the work of African American authors like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Anne Spencer, among others.
  • Beltway Poetry Quaterly includes a few other poems by Fauset, who also wrote essays and novels.
Contemporary Connections

A historical marker in Pennsylvania commemorates the home where Jessie Fauset died in 1961.

css.php