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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.

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