Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/136

114 opportunity offered by American colleges. He is a graduate of Brown University. Writing has been his employment since graduation, and he has been on the staffs of several New England papers. His first book of poems, entitled The Heart of the World (1919), now in the second edition, reveals at once a student of poetry and an independent artist in verse. His second book, Poems of the Four Seas (1921), shows that his vein is still rich in ore.

In Chapter VIII I give his “Goodbye, Old Year.” Another poem of similar technique takes for its title the last words of Colonel Roosevelt: “Turn out the light, please.” The reader cannot but note the sense of proper effect exhibited in the short sentences, the very manner of a dying man. But more than this will be perceived in this poem. It will seem to have sprung out of the world-weary soul of the young poet himself. Struggle, grief, weariness in the strife, have been his also. Hence:

Turn out the light. Now would I slumber, I’m weary with the toil of day. Let me forget my pains to number. Turn out the light. Dreams come to play. Turn out the light. The hours were dreary. Clouds of despair long hid the sun. I’ve battled hard and now I’m weary. Turn out the light. My day is done.