Page:Negro poets and their poems (IA negropoetstheirp00kerl).pdf/70

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In the year of Dunbar’s death (1906), J. Mord Allen published his Rhymes, Tales, and Rhymed Tales. The contents are mainly in dialect, dialect that possesses, as it seems to me, every merit of that medium. There is great felicity of characterization, surprising turns of wit, quaint philosophy. In a later chapter I will give a specimen of Mr. Allen’s dialect verse, here two standard English poems. In both mediums his credentials are authentic, no whit less so than even Dunbar’s. Only the question arises why his muse became silent after this one utterance—for he was at the time but thirty-one years old. Perhaps poetry did not go with boiler-making, his occupation. Because of the date of his one book I place him here with Dunbar, and there are yet other reasons.

Mr. Allen affords but two standard English poems, the first and the last of his book. Such a fact marks him as of the elder day, though that day be less than a score of years agone. The concluding poem of his book has a sweet sadness that must appeal to every heart whose childhood is getting to be far away:

“Eeny meeny miny mo.” Ah, how the sad-sweet Long Ago Enyouths us, as by magic spell, With that old rhyme. You know it well;