Category: Poem

Sea Lyric

By William Stanley Braithwaite

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

Artist Unknown. *Portrait of a Black Sailor (Paul Cuffe?)*. Oil on canvas, c. 1880, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Over the seas to-night, love,
  Over the darksome deeps,
Over the seas to-night, love,
  Slowly my vessel creeps.

Over the seas to-night, love,
  Walking the sleeping foam—
Sailing away from thee, love,
  Sailing from thee and home.

Over the seas to-night, love,
  Dreaming beneath the spars—
Till in my dreams you shine, love,
Bright as the listening stars.

Braithwaite, william stanley. “Sea Lyric,” IN THE UPWARD PATH: A READER FOR COLORED CHILDREN, ED. MYRON T. PRITCHARD AND MARY WHITE OVINGTON, 189. HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, 1920.

Contexts

This poem appeared 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, “[t]o 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.”

“Sea Lyric” was initially included in Braithwaite’s 1904 poetry book Lyrics of Life and Love, wherein the poem was not segmented into stanzas.

1900s Birds Decade Poem

Pigeons out Walking

By Josephine Preston Peabody

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

[Feeding the Pigeons, Boston Common, Boston, Mass.] Photographic negative, bet. 1900 and 1920, Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress. Public Domain.

They never seem to hurry,—no,
  Even for the crowd.
They dip, and coo, and move as slow,[1]
  All so soft and proud!
You can see the wavy specks
Of bubble-color on their necks;
  —Little, little Cloud.

Cloud that goes, the very way
  All the Bubbles do:
Blue and green, and green and gray,
  Gold and rosy, too.
And they talk as Bubbles could
If they only ever would
  Talk and call and coo!

—Till you try to catch one so,
  Just to make it stay
While the colors turn. But Oh,
  Then they fly away!—
All at once, two, three, four, five—
Like a snowstorm all alive,—
  Gray and white, and gray!

Peabody, Josephine Preston. “Pigeons out Walking,” in The Book of the Little Past, 10. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.

[1] Male pigeons coo to attract their mates.

Contexts

Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Book of the Little Past (1908), illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green, gathered previously published and unpublished poems in which the author touched upon various subjects from a child’s perspective. A favorable 1908 review from The Bellman, a Minneapolis literary magazine, asserted that the volume would be “read and remembered and quoted as few poems of children are,” and referred to Peabody as “one of the first of American lyric poets.”

Resources for Further Study

“Pigeon Watch: Get to Know (and Love) Our Amazing City Birds.”
“Where Did Pigeons Come From?”, by Justine E. Hausheer.
In “Why Pigeons Feel at Home in the City,” Martha Foley talks to Dr. Curt Stager, Professor of Biology at Paul Smith’s College, about the adaptability of pigeons to urban environments.
In “The Origins of Our Misguided Hatred for Pigeons,” Matt Soniak engages with sociologist Colin Jerolmack’s research on how these birds came to be considered city pests in the United States. Starting in the late XIX century, the public opinion on pigeons shifted from “innocent bird, to mundane nuisance, to public enemy in just a few decades,” with a marked negative turn in the 1930s and 1940s. The term “rats with wings,” for instance, was coined as recently as 1966 by a New York City Parks Commissioner.
The American Pigeon Museum and Library in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, features permanent exhibits such as Pigeons in Wartime, The History of Pigeon Racing, A Shadow Over the Earth: The Life and Death of the Passenger Pigeon, and Project Sea Hunt: Pigeons and the Coast Guard.

1900s Cats Decade Genre Poem Themes

Concerning Love

By Josephine Preston Peabody

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

Lilla Cabot Perry. *Woman with a Cat.* Oil on canvas, 1901.
Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

I wish she would not ask me if I love the
    Kitten more than her.
Of Course I love her. But I love the Kitten,
    Too; and It has Fur.

Peabody, Josephine Preston. “Concerning love,” in The Book of the Little Past, 11. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.

Contexts

1900s Decade Genre Poem Wild animals

Market

By Josephine Preston Peabody

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

Detroit Publishing Co. *Lexington Market, Baltimore, Maryland.* Dry plate negative, bet. 1900 and 1910, Library of Congress. Public Domain.

I went to Market yesterday,
 And it is like a Fair
Of everything you'd like to see;
  But nothing live is there:
—The Pigeons, hanging up to eat;
And Rabbits, by their little feet!—
  And no one seemed to care.

And there were Fishes out in rows,
  Bright ones of every kind;
Some were pink, and silver too;
  But all of them were blind.
Yes, everything you'd like to touch.—
It would not make you happy much,
  But no one seemed to mind.

And loveliest of all, a Deer!—
  Only its eyes were blurred;
And hanging by it, very near,
  A beautiful great Bird.
So I could smooth his feathers through,
And kiss them, very softly, too:
  But Oh, he never stirred!

Frans Snyders. *Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market.* Oil on canvas, 1614, Art Institute of Chicago. Public Domain.

Peabody, Josephine Preston. “Market,” in The Book of the Little Past, 19. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.

Contexts

Resources for Further Study

In his 1991 essay “The American Public Market” (password protected), James M. Mayo argues that the public market system in the United States, highly influenced by its European counterparts, reached its peak “when the American economic structure was highly local or regional.” According to Mayo, overshadowed by private enterprise and corporatism, public markets were eventually associated with “a form of social life worth saving” and became the focus of historic preservation efforts.
In her 1997 article “Feeding the Cities: Public Market and Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” Helen Tangires offers a brief historical survey of American public markets. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, discourses about the need to maintain, protect, and regulate public markets through municipal action found their way to contemporary newspaper columns and specialized journals. Public markets were considered indicators of “a city’s health and well-being” and many people fought “to protect them from private enterprise.”
Helen Tangires’s 2008 book Public Markets delivers a comprehensive illustrated account of public markets’ buildings and spaces throughout the years.

Contemporary Connections

Nancy B. Kurland and Linda Aleci. “From Civic Institution to Community Place: The Meaning of the Public Market in Modern America.”

The Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, founded by the City of Greensboro in 1874, remains committed to sell products either grown or made by the sellers.

1900s Decade Genre Landscape Poem Themes

The Journey

By Josephine Preston Peabody

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

Original illustration by Elizabeth Shippen Green from *The Book of the Little Past*, between pp. 8 and 9.

Never saw the hills so far
And blue, the way the pictures are;

And flowers, flowers growing thick,
But not a one for me to pick!

The land was running from the train,
All blurry through the window-pane.

And then it all looked flat and still,
When up there jumped a little hill!

I saw the windows and the spires,
And sparrows sitting on the wires;

And fences, running up and down;
And then we cut straight through a town.

I saw a Valley, like a cup;
And ponds that twinkled, and dried up.

I counted meadows, that were burnt;
And there were trees,—and then there weren't!

We crossed the bridges with a roar,
Then hummed, the way we went before.

And tunnels made it dark and light
Like open-work of day and night.

Until I saw the chimneys rise,
And lights and lights and lights, like eyes.

And when they took me through the door,
I heard it all begin to roar.—

I thought—as far as I could see—
That everybody wanted Me!

Peabody, Josephine Preston. “The Journey,” in The Book of the Little Past, 8-9. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908.

Contexts

The speaker from “The Journey” takes readers along on a scenic train route. Trains were a popular means of transportation in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, although leisure travel remained a luxury. According to the Library of Congress, railroad construction accelerated in the 1870s (after the Civil War), and, by 1900 “much of the nation’s railroad system was in place.”

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

spire: A tall structure rising from a tower, roof, etc., and terminating in a slender point; esp. the tapering portion of the steeple of a cathedral or church, usually carried to a great height and constituting one of the chief architectural features of the building.

Resources for Further Study

“Railroads in the Late 19th Century,” in the Library of Congress website.
The railroad construction boom brought with it fierce competition between railroad tycoons seeking to expand their lines. With the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, Congress acted against railroad monopolies and “railroads became the first industry subject to Federal regulation.”
Smithsonian Magazine article on the Pullman porters, African-American men employed by the Pullman Company, a railroad manufacturer and operator. The Pullman porters, who assisted wealthy (white) travelers in the company’s sleeper cars, became synonymous with luxury train travel since the late 1860s and until 1968. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which they founded in 1925, became “the first African-American labor union to succeed in brokering a collective bargaining agreement with a major corporation.”

Contemporary Connections

“What Travel Looked Like Through the Decades,” in Travel + Leisure magazine.

1920s African American Poem

The Bronze Legacy (To A Brown Boy)

By Effie Lee Newsome

Annotations by Rene Marzuk

Augusta Savage. *Gamin*. Painted plaster, c. 1929, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Benjamin and Olya Margolin. Public Domain.

‘Tis a noble gift to be brown, all brown, 
    Like the strongest things that make
    up this earth,
Like the mountains grave and grand,
    Even like the very land,
    Even like the trunks of trees— 
    Even oaks, to be like these!
God builds His strength in bronze.

To be brown like thrush and lark![1][2] 
    Like the subtle wren so dark!
Nay, the king of beasts wears brown;[3] 
    Eagles are of this same hue.
I thank God, then, I am brown. 
    Brown has mighty things to do.

NEWSOME, EFFIE LEE. “THE BRONZE LEGACY (TO A BROWN BOY).” THE CRISIS 24, NO. 6 (OCTOBER 1922): 265.

*Wood Thrush, from the Birds of America Series (N4) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes Brands.* Commercial color lithograph, 1888, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

[1] The thrushes are a large passerine bird family, also known as perching birds or songbirds. Although some of the thrushes that occur in North America are brown, like the wood thrush pictured above, they vary in color and include species like the American robin and the eastern bluebird!

[2] The larks are a large family of songbirds whose species occur mainly in Africa. According to the OED, however, the name, when used without specification, usually refers to the Eurasian skylark, a brown songbird celebrated by poets and naturalists alike. The horned lark is the only lark that is native to North America. During the early twentieth-century, English settlers tried to introduce the Eurasian skylark to the region with little success, although a small population of these famous songbirds persists in southern Vancouver Island.

[3] The king of beasts, i.e., the lion.

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:

thrush: A name of two British and general European birds.

Resources for Further Study

In October 1922, W. E. B. Du Bois sent a typed copy of “The Bronze Legacy (To a Brown Boy),” to Margaret S. Thompson, a subscriber to The Crisis who had apparently inquired about the poem. Both the printed copy and Du Bois’s accompanying letter at available online, courtesy of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives.
Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, champion of multicultural children’s literature, makes a case for reading Effie Lee Newsome today.

Contemporary Connections

In her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, Robin Bernstein illustrates how the American idea of childhood innocence became racialized and excluded black children. A poem like Newsome’s “The Bronze Legacy” pushes in the opposite direction while encouraging racial pride.

1910s African American Poem Seasons Trees

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

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

In her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, Robin Bernstein illustrates how the American idea of childhood innocence became racialized and excluded black children.
Georgia Douglas Johnson: Rereading the Harlem Renaissance.

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.

1890s Poem Wild animals

The Yak

By Oliver Herford

Annotations by Karen Kilcup

Oliver Herford, “The Yak.” Original print accompanying the poem.

This is the Yak, so neg-li-gée:[1]
His coif-fure’s like a stack of hay;
He lives so far from Any-where,
I fear the Yak neg-lects his hair,
And thing, since there is none to see,
What mat-ter how un-kempt he be.
How would he feel if he but know
That in this Pic-ture-book I drew
His Phys-i-go-no-my un-shorn,
For chil-dren to de-ride and scorn?

Herford, Oliver. “The Yak.” A Child’s Primer of Natural History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.xt goes here.

[1] The yak is a type of large ox native to the Tibetan plateau. Himalayan people rely on domesticated yaks for carrying loads.

Contexts

When Herford published his book, natural history was an obsessive subject for children’s writers. Popular magazines like St. Nicholas led the way, creating study groups like the St. Nicholas League and advocacy for bird protection through its Bird Defenders. Exotic animals seemed to particularly fascinate American children. Contributors to St. Nick included prominent scientists like William T. Hornaday, who became the director of the New York Zoological Park (commonly known as the Bronx Zoo), and who founded the National Zoo in Washington, DC; famous naturalist John Burroughs; and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts of America.

Herford’s poems, as well as their accompanying images, presented more fanciful accounts of animals but sometimes offered short natural history lessons. In this case, Herford emphasizes sloths’ upside-down lifestyle. All the poems in this book hyphenate some words, presumably to instruct children—and their parents—how to read.

Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary:

coiffure: style or fashion of dressing the hair

deride: to laugh at in contempt or scorn; to mock

negligée (in this context): dressed informally, dressed as if in a nightgown

physiognomy: The study of features of the face . . . or the body generally . . . the art of judging character from such study

unkempt: of hair, a beard: not combed, well-maintained; untidy, scruffy

unshorn: not cut or cropped

Resources for Further Study

“Yak.” Britannica.
“Yak.” DK findout!
“Yaks.” Extravagant Yak Travel Company.

Contemporary Connections

“Talking Yak.” National Geographic, March 26, 2019.

“Tibetan Yak.” The Alaska Zoo.

1940s African American Life and Death Poem

The Golden Garden Spider

By Effie Lee Newsome

Annotations by Karen Kilcup

Original 1940 woodcut for “The Golden Garden Spider,”
by Lois Mailou Jones. Public Domain.

The golden garden spider[1]
Has grasshoppers for lunch—
At least they hang beside her—
I’ve never seen her munch.
And yet they swing there every day,
And always in a different way.

Sometimes I glance at her at dawn,
But seldom find her food all gone.
It isn’t hard to tell you why—
She traps grasshoppers passing by,
The wraps them in her web all day.
When their long legs get caught they stay,
And kicking can’t do any good—
Somehow, sometimes—I wish it would.

Newsome, Effie Lee. “The Golden Garden Spider.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 13.

[1] Probably the Yellow Garden Spider, Argiope aurantia, which spins a circular web.

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, whimsically enacts a natural history lesson, while it encourages children’s imagination.

Resources for Further Study

Claborn, John. “The Crisis, the Politics of Nature, and the Harlem Renaissance: Effie Lee Newsome’s Eco-poetics.” Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895-1941. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
“Effie Lee Newsome, 1885-1978.” Poets.org. This site provides access to seven of Newsome’s poems.
Newsome, Effie Lee. Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Courtesy of the New York Public Library, this site provides access to the entire text.
Smith, Barbara H. “Beneficial Yellow Garden Spiders,” July 30, 2020. “Yellow Garden Spider, Argiope aurantia.” National Wildlife Federation.

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.

1890s Humor Outdoors Poem Wild animals

An Arctic Hare

By Oliver Herford

Annotations by Karen Kilcup

Oliver Herford, “An Arctic Hare.” Original print accompanying the poem.

An Arc-tic Hare we now be-hold.
The hair, you will ob-serve, is white;[1]
But if you think the Hare is old,
You will be ver-y far from right.
The Hare is young, and yet the hair
Grew white in but a sin-gle night.
When, then it must have been a scare
That turned this Hare. No; ’twas not fright
(Al-though such cases are well known);
I fear that once a-gain you’re wrong.
Know then, that in the Arc-tic Zone
A sin-gle night is six months long.[2]

Herford, Oliver. “An Arctic Hare.” A Child’s Primer of Natural History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.

[1] Arctic hares live in Alaska, northern Canada, and parts of Greenland. They have large rear feet like snowshoes, and their coats turn white in the winter to help them evade predators. Those animals that live in the northernmost part of the species’ range remain white all year.

[2] In the Arctic the sun disappears beneath the horizon for several months, but most places in the zone have a twilight that lasts for many hours. See Rao in Resources.

Contexts

When Herford published his book, natural history was an obsessive subject for children’s writers. Popular magazines like St. Nicholas led the way, creating study groups like the St. Nicholas League and advocacy for bird protection through its Bird Defenders. Exotic or unfamiliar animals seemed to particularly fascinate American children. Contributors to St. Nick included prominent scientists like William T. Hornaday, who became the director of the New York Zoological Park (commonly known as the Bronx Zoo), and who founded the National Zoo in Washington, DC; famous naturalist John Burroughs; and Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts of America.

Herford’s poems, as well as their accompanying images, presented more fanciful accounts of animals but sometimes offered short natural history lessons. In this case, Herford foregrounds the hares’ native habitat, with its very short winter nights (although he exaggerates the duration of darkness). All the poems in this book hyphenate some words, presumably to instruct children—and their parents—how to read.

Resources for Further Study

“Animal Facts: Arctic Hare.” Canadian Geographic, June 6, 2019.
“Arctic Hare—Lepus arcticus.” Nature Works, NH PBS.
Rao, Joe. “The Myth of Arctic Daylight and Darkness Exposed.” LiveScience, September 21, 2010. An astronomer unpacks the myth.

Contemporary Connections

The video “Arctic Hare” (by Wildlife All About) shows the hares in their natural habitat and gives information about the animals’ characteristics, behaviors, and challenges.

The WWF (World Wildlife Fund) has a symbolic adoption program that helps raise funds to protect the arctic hare.