Spring in New Hampshire

by Claude McKay

 

SPRING IN

NEW HAMPSHIRE

AND OTHER POEMS

 

SPRING IN
NEW HAMPSHIRE
AND OTHER POEMS

 

By
CLAUDE McKAY

 

LONDON

GRANT RICHARDS LTD

St. Martin's Street

1920

Printed at The Morland Press Ltd 190 Ebury Street London SW1

Preface

The writer of these verses was born in the Clarendon Hills of Jamaica in 1889. In 1911 he published a small volume in the Negro dialect, and later left for the United States where he worked in various occupations and took courses in Agriculture and English at the Kansas State College. In the spring of this year he visited England to arrange for the publication of his poems.

Claude McKay is a pure blooded Negro, and though we have recently been made aware of some of the more remarkable achievements of African Art typified by the sculpture from Benin, and in music by the 'Spirituals,' this is the first instance of success in poetry with which we in Europe at any rate have been brought into contact. The reasons for this late development are not far to seek, and the difficulties presented by modern literary English as an acquired medium would be sufficient to account for the lacuna; but the poems here selected may, in the opinion of not a few who have seen them in periodical form, claim a place beside the best work that the present generation is producing in this country.

I. A. RICHARDS

Cambridge, England.
September, 1920.

 

Acknowledgments are due to the Editors of The Seven Arts, the American Pearson's and The Liberator, where, as in the current issue of The Cambridge Magazine a number of the poems included in this volume have appeared.

An American edition is being published simultaneously by Alfred A. Knopf, 220 West Forty-second Street, New York.

 

Contents

Spring in New Hampshire		9
The Spanish Needle		10
The Lynching		11
To O.E.A.		12
Alfonso, Dressing to Wait at Table, Sings		13
Flowers of Passion		14
To Work		15
Morning Joy		16
Reminiscences		17
On Broadway		18
Love Song		19
North and South		20
Rest in Peace		21
A Memory of June		22
To Winter		23
Winter in the Country		24
After the Winter		25
The Tropics in New York		26
I Shall Return		27
The Castaways		28
December 1919		29
Flame-Heart		30
In Bondage		31
Harlem Shadows		32
The Harlem Dancer		33
A Prayer		34
The Barrier		35
When Dawn Comes to the City		36
The Choice		37
Sukee River		38
Exhortation		39