Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/206

184 For of what they make we are servants all, They have bound our lives in an iron thrall, We do their bidding, we heed their call, As they work with willing zeal. So tap your heats with a courage bold, You’re worth to your world a thousand fold More than the men who mine her gold, You men who make her steel!

Intrinsic merit is in that poem, apart from the circumstance of its being written by a workman himself. As an interpretation of the life of his fellow-workmen—their imaginative, inner life—it is a human document to be reflected upon. As for the artistic quality of the verses they place you in imagination amid the sights and sounds described and they have something in them suggestive of the steel bars the men are making.

In what strange disguises comes ofttimes the call to nobler things! Our happiness not seldom springs out of seeming misfortune. An illustration is afforded by Mr. Irvin W. Underhill, of Philadelphia, to whom blindness brought a more glorious seeing—the seeing of truth, of greater meaning in life, of greater beauty in the world. Out of this new vision springs a corresponding message in verse, a message not of bitterness for