Week 5 is so star-studded I just don’t know where to begin. Any of us beyond a certain age grew up hearing, reading and reciting Robert Frost’s Mending Walls. Revisiting it at the end of week 5 is quite like eating comfort food, spicy with lots of rich, complex carbohydrates. But let us begin at the beginning.
(There are excerpts here from prior year forum postings.)
Edwin Rolfe is a poet I may have never become acquainted with were it not for ModPo. I have grown quite fond of him since our meeting, and even went out and found an edition of his Collected Poems, a book that has found its place among my many quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. I am less inclined to refer to him as a Communist poet (the big C always makes me ill, especially these days), and more inclined to refer to him as an accomplished poet who wrote beautifully about the world he found himself inhabiting. I suspect the best poetry written in the run-up to and during the Spanish Civil War has been very conveniently cancelled erased by the powers that be. Along with the poetry condemning lynching that was so prevalent during the same period. I mean, didn’t the big “they” hound Billie Holiday literally to death for singing a song about it? Similar was the fate of Rolfe’s poetry criticizing the practice of sharecropping, and many poems by other writers condemning the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. OK. That’s all I’m gonna say about that.
The so-called Harlem Renaissance acquaints us with two week 5 poets, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen. I say “so-called” because (1) it wasn’t localized in Harlem, and (2) the rebirth lost its forward momentum, it appears, when the rich white patrons funding it withdrew their patronage to the various artists and creatives with the 1929 stock market crash and the resulting Great Depression. Poof! Disappeared. I am still looking for the “manifesto” of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, and every time I find something that might be it, it crumbles into dust. Right in my hands. My conclusion, for what it’s worth, is that the Harlem Renaissance was just another piece of mythology in the grand story of life that comes back periodically to haunt us.
Nevertheless I am a big fan of the week 5 Jamaican poet, Claude McKay. Since elementary school when I learned to recite “If We Must Die.” Claude McKay’s often anthologized, perfectly pitched Elizabethan sonnet reflected the sentiments of its time in more ways than one. First, its form and structure made it very much at home and acceptable to the arbiters of good taste and fine art in the waning days of the British Empire and we will return to that later so hold that thought. Further, it reflected the racial events of its time as black soldiers were returning home from war in the European theatre with hopes of ‘cashing in” on their military service, only to run headlong into a vicious counterattack from whites and new immigrant groups fomenting race riots in America’s largest cities, all while at the height of the Great Migration of rural Southern blacks seeking opportunity in the urban North.
Of far greater significance to me is the pessimistic tone that lived (and yet, lives) just beneath the surface of the poem. “If we must die” allows no other option and no redemption. Only death. Death is certain, as death always eventually is, and facing that eventual death is the foundation of Stoic faith, not Christian faith, mind you, but Roman Stoic faith. In that regard, I’ve always viewed this poem as a suicide note, “penned (loads of double-entendre) in an inglorious spot.”
“If We Must Die” would survive the Harlem Renaissance, get resurrected in Great Britain during the WW2 blitz and get read aloud by PM Winston Churchill in London to the combined House of Commons and the House of Lords when it seemed all but certain that England would be overrun by Hitler’s Germany.
Personally, I think McKay’s celebrated sonnet also was intended to send a coded signal and implied message to J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men, who kept McKay under constant surveillance (of which he was keenly aware) both for his Communist Party connections and for attempts to blackmail him due to his alleged homosexual alliances. He warned them that he would always fight back and that they should as well.
In the soundcloud recording that follows, I address briefly the meta nature of the sonnet, warning us of the possible extinction of an art form. But I’ll leave that up to you to listen and think about.
Soundcloud audio: https://soundcloud.com/raymond-maxwell/claude-mckay-closing-thoughts
Countee Cullen was a fascinating poet who constantly struggled with his spirituality as well as his sexual orientation. And the struggle often emerged at the cutting edge of his poetry. In “Yet Do I Marvel” his essential message (in my close reading of this poem) has nothing to do with race, with making poets black and asking them to sing. That the mere idea of race is not introduced until the final rhyming couplet is a signal. The Idea of the final couplet DOES connect the poem, and Cullen, to a noble lineage of important poets, including James Weldon Johnson (O Black and Unknown Bards), Paul Lawrence Dunbar (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), Jupiter Hammon (the first African American to publish a poem) and Phillis Wheatley (the first African American to publish a volume of poems), and even back to the Psalmist (137), who proclaimed “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” No new ground was broken there. But he does establish impeccable credentials . . .
This poem’s essential message posits the improbability of the very existence of a god (or God) of any consequence. “I doubt not God” introduces the idea of doubt, “and did He stoop to quibble” reinforces that doubt. “Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die” seals the deal, and the mention of Tantalus and Sisyphus, Greeks who struggled in vain and aimlessly against a multiplicity of gods, effectively shuts down both monotheistic and polytheistic considerations. This poem’s central message can be summed up in four words: There is no god. Everything else is a footnote. Using the sonnet form to convey that message, hidden inside a race diatribe, provides necessary camouflage and prophylactic protection but is otherwise unremarkable.
Whew, that was a load! Just for fun, here’s a response from 1928 to Cullen’s poem that I found researching for my sonnet anthology project:
Jonathan H. Brooks – Still I Am Marveling
(After reading Countee Cullen’s ‘Yet Do I Marvel’)
from Opportunity 1928
My friend, you marvel how this thing can be,
A blackened bard is told to sing; and I
Am moved to supplement you: I muse why
And when Apollo’s rare proclivity;
How he can muster ample nerve to try
This way of beauty, knowing full well, Ay!
How, begging, Homer died. I dimly see,
Since it is proved that dye of any hue
Does not impair the essence of a thing.
How two of equal gifts and chance may do
An equal deed. Still I am marvelling—
How one black poet ploughs the whole day long
And burns the oil of midnight for a song?
Final word. Robert Frost.
I read somewhere that Robert’s Frost’s favorite poem was James Shirley’s “The Glories of Our Blood and State” and that he would often recite it from memory on special occasions. You can find it here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56372/the-glories-of-our-blood-and-state
ModPo 