Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/214

192 Too soon is hushed his silver speech, The music dies upon his lute, The cadence falls beyond our reach; Too soon the Poet’s lips are mute.

So wrote in this elegy, Lacrimae Aethiopiae, Charles Bertram Johnson, of this untimely dead singer. Hardly a score of poems are in this pamphlet, yet enough are here to reveal a poet in the making. Jamison was a better poet, even in these imperfect pieces, than many a writer of better verses. Here are the ardent impulses and here are the glowing ideas from which poetry of the higher order springs. The art, however, is undisciplined, grammar, metre, and rhymes are sometimes at fault. However, bold strokes of poetry atone, the effects are the effects of a real poet. Sometimes one finds in the small collection a poem that is all but perfect, a production that might have come from a maturer craftsman. I venture to put him to the test in the following poem: