And bigot pride to that philosophy
And that far-glancing wisdom which it veils,
Of joy in beauty, hardihood in toil,
Of hope in tribulation, and of wide
Adaptive power without a parallel
In chronicles of men.
A sonnet entitled To a Caged Canary in a Negro Restaurant will present the poet’s people with the persuasiveness of pathos as the foregoing poem with the persuasiveness of reason:
Thou little golden bird of happy song!
A cage cannot restrain the rapturous joy
Which thou dost shed abroad. Thou dost employ
Thy bondage for high uses. Grievous wrong
Is thine; yet in thy heart glows full and strong
The tropic sun, though far beyond thy flight,
And though thou flutterest there by day and night
Above the clamor of a dusky throng.
So let my will, albeit hedged about
By creed and caste, feed on the light within;
So let my song sing through the bars of doubt
With light and healing where despair has been;
So let my people bide their time and place,
A hindered but a sunny-hearted race.
It would be an injustice to this poet did I convey the idea that his seventy-odd poems are exclusively occupied with race wrongs and oppression. Not a few of them bear no stamp of an oppressed or afflicted spirit, though of sorrow they may have been nurtured.
