Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/58

36 the strife of thwarted passions, the defeat of true love.

A stanza or two from Whitman’s An Idyl of the South will exemplify his qualities. The hero of this pathetic tale is a white youth of aristocratic parentage, the heroine is an octoroon. He is thus described:

He was of manly beauty—brave and fair; There was the Norman iron in his blood, There was the Saxon in his sunny hair That waved and tossed in an abandoned flood; But Norman strength rose in his shoulders square, And so, as manfully erect he stood, Norse gods might read the likeness of their race In his proud bearing and patrician face.

The heroine is thus portrayed:

A lithe and shapely beauty; like a deer, She looked in wistfulness, and from you went; With silken shyness shrank as if in fear, And kept the distance of the innocent. But, when alone, she bolder would appear; Then all her being into song was sent To bound in cascades—ripple, whirl, and gleam, A headlong torrent in a crystal stream.

Only tragedy, under the conditions, could result from their mutual fervent love. The poet does not moralize but in a figure intimates the sadness induced by the tale:

The hedges may obscure the sweetest bloom— The orphan of the waste—the lowly flower;