Category: Life and Death

Categories
1940s African American Life and Death Poem

The Golden Garden Spider

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
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.

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 Farm life Insects Life and Death Poem Wild animals

Johnny Greenjacket

Johnny Greenjacket

By Effie Lee Newsome
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Grasshopper, colored pring, late 17th-early 18th century.
Attributed to Maria Sybilla Merian (1647-1717). Public Domain.
Johnny Greenjacket, a grasshopper, gay,
Gave a great banquet one midsummer day.
The geese were all present, some quail and a pheasant—
This part is unpleasant—
While waiting for dinner, just after the toast,
The guests became hungry,
And ate up their host.
Newsome, Effie Lee. “Johnny Greenjacket.” Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1940, 10.

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.

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.

Categories
1910s Life and Death Native American Poem Rivers Water

Song of the Oktahutchee

Song of the Oktahutchee

By Alexander Posey (Muskogee Creek)
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Untitled, pastoral river scene. Oil, 1874, by William Rickarby Miller. Public Domain.
Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Far, far, far are my silver waters drawn;[1]
	The hills embrace me loth to let me go;
The maidens think me fair to look upon,
	And trees lean over, glad to hear me flow.
Thro’ field and valley, green because of me,
	I wander, wander to the distant sea.
Tho’ I sing my song in a minor key,
	Broad lands and fair attest to the good I do;
Tho’ I carry no white sails to the sea,
	Towns nestle in the vales I wander thro’;
And quails are whistling in the waving grain,
	And herds are scattered o’er the verdant plain.
Posey, Alexander. “Song of the Oktahutchee.” Indian School Journal 6, no. 10 (April 1910): 30

[1] The poem speaks in the river’s voice.

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, this poem’s subject, 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 Posey poems appear in The Envious Lobster as versions he published in the school’s magazine.

This poem celebrating the Oktahutchee is especially poignant, given the poet’s close connection to the river.

Resources for Further Study
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.

Canadian River near Oklahoma City, Indian Territory. Photo, May 21, 1889,
by J. C. Chrisney.
The Oktahutchee River was known to white settlers as the North Canadian.
Categories
1910s Flowers Life and Death Native American Poem

To a Daffodil

To a Daffodil

By Alexander Posey (Muskogee Creek)
Annotations by Karen Kilcup
Daffodils in Winter. Pastel, c1902, by Sarah Wyman Whitman. Public Domain.
When Death has shut the blue skies out from me, sweet Daffodil,[1]
	And Years roll on without my memory,
Thou’lt reach thy tender fingers down to mine of clay,
	A true friend still,
Although I’ll never know thee till the judgment day.
Posey, Alexander. “To a Daffodil.” Indian School Journal 6, no. 10 (April 1910): 30.

[1] Popular in the United States and around the world, daffodils are a type of narcissus that flower in early spring. Mentioned in gardening books and journals as early as the 1600s, they encompass 32,000 cultivars today, though many fewer are commercially available.books and journals as early as the 1600s, they encompass 32,000 cultivars today.

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.

Daffodils in Cornwall, England. Photo courtesy the National Trust.

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