Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/158

136 And bigot pride to that philosophy And that far-glancing wisdom which it veils, Of joy in beauty, hardihood in toil, Of hope in tribulation, and of wide Adaptive power without a parallel In chronicles of men.

A sonnet entitled To a Caged Canary in a Negro Restaurant will present the poet’s people with the persuasiveness of pathos as the foregoing poem with the persuasiveness of reason:

Thou little golden bird of happy song! A cage cannot restrain the rapturous joy Which thou dost shed abroad. Thou dost employ Thy bondage for high uses. Grievous wrong Is thine; yet in thy heart glows full and strong The tropic sun, though far beyond thy flight, And though thou flutterest there by day and night Above the clamor of a dusky throng. So let my will, albeit hedged about By creed and caste, feed on the light within; So let my song sing through the bars of doubt With light and healing where despair has been; So let my people bide their time and place, A hindered but a sunny-hearted race.

It would be an injustice to this poet did I convey the idea that his seventy-odd poems are exclusively occupied with race wrongs and oppression. Not a few of them bear no stamp of an oppressed or afflicted spirit, though of sorrow they may have been nurtured.