]slug[A Companion to Poetic Genres, First Edition. Edited by Erik Martiny

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

]cn[16

]ct[African American Sonnets: Voicing Justice and Personal Dignity

]au[Jeff Westover

]p[There is no monolithic blackness nor a single tradition of sonnet writing among black writers.

Elizabeth Alexander sums up this idea in the second stanza of her 24-line poem “Today’s

News”: “I didn’t want to write a poem that said ‘blackness / is,’ because we know better than

anyone / that we are not one or ten or ten thousand things” (14–16). To keep Alexander’s point

in mind, in what follows I focus primarily on political protest and personal dignity in sonnets by

twentieth-century African American poets. While my approach turns from the tradition of the

love sonnet to the subsidiary tradition of the political sonnet, one could just as easily address the

way black poets since the Harlem Renaissance have adapted the sonnet to write about love. My

choice is simply a pragmatic one, based on the central fact of racism and the historic response of

black writers to it.

]p[Echoing important political sonnets by Milton, Wordsworth, and Shelley while addressing

racism and the rich resources of black culture to counteract it, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, Paul

Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, and others

make their contributions to the political sonnet tradition by celebrating such luminaries as

Toussaint L’Ouverture (Ray), Frederick Douglass (Dunbar and Hayden), Booker T. Washington,

Marcus Garvey (McKay), Mary McLeod Bethune and Malcolm X (Walker). In other sonnets,

Gwendolyn Brooks and Melvin Tolson address political issues more broadly. More recently,

Marilyn Nelson has published a sonnet sequence commemorating Emmet Till, while Natasha

Trethewey published another about black Civil War soldiers. Still other sonnets by African

Americans are less public and formal, focusing more on personal experience and a wide range of

issues, including, of course, love. For example, Helene Johnson praises the individuality of a

young man in “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem,” while Gwendolyn Brooks celebrates a woman full

of life and vigor in “The Rites for Cousin Vit” and provides a series of character profiles of black

veterans during World War II in “Gay Chaps at the Bar.” Rita Dove offers many sonnets in the

context of the Persephone myth in Mother Love, Jay Wright reflects on his spiritual experience,

Lucille Clifton dreams about the Virgin Mary, God, and the poet, June Jordan celebrates

shadows or addresses a lover, Michael Harper pays tribute to Sterling Brown and Paul Laurence

Dunbar, Sonia Sanchez reflects on love, Cornelius Eady honors Muddy Waters, Yusef

Komunyakaa meditates about racism, his father, and Charlie Parker, while Carl Phillips muses

about desire and spirituality, and Elizabeth Alexander reflects on Paul Robeson or is visited by

Pablo Neruda in a dream.

]p[Like Shelley in “Ozymandias” or Wordsworth in his sonnets to Milton and Toussaint

L’Ouverture, African American poets criticize injustice or celebrate the achievements of

important forebears. For example, in “Douglass” (1903) Paul Laurence Dunbar echoes

Wordsworth’s apostrophe to Milton in “London, 1802.” Both sonnets call upon famous

predecessors to help mitigate a contemporary crisis. Like Wordsworth’s Milton, Dunbar’s

Frederick Douglass represents an inspiring moral ideal. In both poems, the power of this ideal

manifests itself in the form of a commanding voice. While Wordsworth links Milton to natural

elements (“Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart / Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like

the sea” [ll.9–10]), Dunbar figures Douglass as an authoritative captain: “Oh, for thy voice high-

sounding o’er the storm / For thy strong arm to guide the shivering bark” (ll.11–12). Like

Wordsworth’s Milton, Douglass offers hope through the inspiring power of his speech. Both

poets also use sea and storm imagery to condemn the injustice of the present and underscore the

heroic stature of their addressees. For Dunbar, America is at sea, for her colored citizens suffer

from a racist “tempest of dispraise” (l.8) in the Jim Crow aftermath of the Civil War, a conflict

whose causes have “Not ended” (l.6). Dunbar pleads with Douglass “To give us comfort through

the lonely dark” (l.14).

]p[While Dunbar stresses Douglass’s imposing physical presence and charismatic language in

the sestet of his tribute, he emphasizes Douglass’s role as an effective witness to the crimes of

slavery and racial injustice when he calls Douglass “the eyes of that harsh long ago” in the

octave of the poem. Dunbar highlights the centrality of Douglass’s vision through alliteration

(Saw, salient, cross) and enjambment that suspends and spotlights the verb (l.4). In his own 1962

sonnet in honor of Douglass, Robert Hayden shares Dunbar’s emphasis on the great man’s

vision. “When it is finally ours, this freedom” (l.1) Hayden writes,

]v[this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

. . . shall be remembered.

]sou[(ll.7–8 and 11; emphasis added) . With the same brisk energy of Hayden’s “visioning,”

Dunbar makes Douglass’s prophetic testimony vivid by associating the comparatively passive

act of perception (“Saw”) with the emphatic modifier that follows it (“salient”). Although

“salient” modifies “such days” (l.2), its proximity to “saw” (l.4) makes the reader associate the

term with Douglass himself, enhancing the characterization of him as a prominent moral witness.

]p[Voice is as fundamental to another important sonnet of 1903 by Dunbar, “Robert Gould

Shaw.”1 In this poem, the voice is that of Fate, but the soldier Shaw responds to it with the same

determination and integrity of purpose that define Douglass. Dunbar frames his octave as a

question in which he asks Shaw, who led a company of black soldiers during the Civil War, why

he sacrificed his advantages “To lead th’ unlettered and despised droves / To manhood’s home

and thunder at the gate?” Unlike the ringing sestets of “Douglass” and “Harriet Beecher Stowe”

(1895), “Robert Gould Shaw” ends on a distinctly pessimistic note by stressing the futility of

Shaw’s sacrifice: “thou and those who with thee died for right / Have died, the Present teaches,

but in vain” (ll.13–14). While the poet calls on Douglass to help confront the troubles of a

present crisis, here he reproaches his era’s failure to live up to Shaw’s example.

]p[The centrality of voice in these poems reminds readers how important oratory has been to the

African American quest for freedom. Voice also figures individuality and verbal dexterity, two

key values for African American poets. Helene Johnson’s 1927 “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem”

focuses on the distinctively personal quality of voice in her celebration of the beauty and

charisma of the young man she addresses:

]v[You are disdainful and magnificent—

Your perfect body and your pompous gait,

Your dark eyes flashing solemnly with hate.

]sou[(1-3)

She relishes his majesty:

]v[Your shoulders towering high above the throng,

Your head thrown back in rich, barbaric song,

Palm trees and mangoes stretched before your eyes.

]sou[(ll.6–8)

Like Dunbar’s Douglass, whose voice can be heard above the storm of social conflict, Johnson’s

young man stands above the crowd. Her focus on a moment of pleased abandon echoes

Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” and distinguishes her poem from the oratorical formality of

Dunbar’s tributes. Johnson’s portrait also echoes those tributes, however, for it celebrates the

young man’s personality by focusing on the singularity of his voice. She uses the primitivism in

vogue during the Harlem Renaissance to enhance her portrait of the young man’s individuality

and his connection to his African ancestry. (While Johnson’s Negro is far more flamboyant,

perhaps he shares something of the “subtle poise” Countee Cullen admires in “Atlantic City

Waiter.”) The imaginative brilliance of his song creates a vivid picture. The landscape of his

music is lush, fertile, and free, in contrast with the urban environment in which he lives. Johnson

contrasts the African pastoral of his song with the drab atmosphere of “this city street” (l.14) in

order to praise the young man’s captivating beauty and denounce the racial oppression that

constrains him.

]p[In the paradox of lines four and five, Johnson characterizes her protagonist as his own man:

“Small wonder that you are incompetent / To imitate those whom you despise” (ll.4–5)

Johnson’s sound effects and line break (“incompetent” versus “imitate”) transfigure a racially

prejudiced view of the black man into a compelling picture of nonconformist self-respect.

Johnson’s artfully quick shift from the stereotypical to the self-reliant shows the same flair that

she admires in the young man. Johnson doubles the contrast between the pastoral and the urban

with another contrast between a pair of rhyming lines from the sestet: “Let others toil and sweat

for labor’s sake / . . . Scorn will efface each footprint that you make” (ll.9, 12). By exposing the

futility of effort in a Jim Crow world, Johnson dismisses stock notions of black laziness in order

to let her readers appreciate the man’s allure. The final lines of the sonnet ally themselves with

the young man by sharing his disdain and pleasure: “I love your laughter arrogant and bold. /

You are too splendid for this city street” (ll.13–14).

]p[In the elocutionary voice of “Yet Do I Marvel,” Countee Cullen zeroes in on a different

conflict, the one between racial injustice and the poetic vocation, by characterizing that injustice

on a cosmic scale. Like “From the Dark Tower,” and like Shakespearean sonnets that contrast a

host of negations with an assertive closing couplet, “Yet Do I Marvel” makes its readers feel the

oppressive weight of a world in which the poet is not at home. It does so, however, to underscore

the paradox of a God who simultaneously handicaps the black poet and demands from him an

inspiring performance. Evoking the tradition of theodicy, Cullen implies that, in a context of

racial inequity, the Miltonic effort to “justify the ways of God to men” goes ironically awry

(Paradise Lost I.25). Starting off with a conventional stance (“I doubt not God is good, well-

meaning, kind”), Cullen inaugurates a series of tragic quatrains, focusing by turns on the fact of

mortality, classical myths of futility, and God’s inscrutability in order to drive home the depth of

the conflict that defines him as a poet (l.1). (Thylias Moss focuses on similar issues in a more

audacious and expansive way in “Passover Poem,” but without concluding that her identity as a

poet is put in jeopardy by them.) While Cullen’s sonnet sums up the dilemma of being a black

poet in a white man’s world, he nevertheless succeeds in singing, alerting readers to the divine

imperative behind his poetic voice and to the specificity of his condition. The sonnet pulls off its

performance with skillful panache.

]p[The same might be said of “From the Dark Tower” (1927), a poem which recounts its racial

wrongs in a series of elegant sentences that express both restraint and stubborn hope. If the

quatrain makes the word “mute” a key end-rhyme, the poem as a whole exemplifies Cullen’s

eloquent expressiveness, which gives the speaker gravity and dignity. While the octave depicts

“The golden increment of bursting fruit” with glamorous abandon, it firmly shows that this

harvest will not be enjoyed by those who produced it. The humiliations of subjugation come to a

head near the end of the octave when the speaker insists that his fellow blacks will “Not always

bend to some more subtle brute” (l.7). To offset this catalogue of wrongs and express the idea

that black is beautiful Cullen draws on the star imagery of Petrarchan tradition.2 In the opening

lines of his sestet, Cullen invests his picture of darkness with subtle allure: “The night whose

sable breast relieves the stark, / White stars is no less lovely being dark” (ll.9–10). By punning

on “relieves” to mean both “provide comfort in the face of white oppression” and “artfully

contrast lesser white light with an encompassing black background,” Cullen figures blackness as

warmly protective and richly exotic. In this scenario, the inspiring darkness rivals the alluring

starlight. Cullen has reversed the usual treatment of stars in sonnets as guiding lights (as in

Shakespeare’s “star to every wand’ring barque” [l.7] or Keats’ “Bright star! would I were as

steadfast as thou art” [l. 1]). Cullen’s praise of black beauty may not be as triumphant as Jean

Toomer’s at the end of “November Cotton Flower” in Cane (1923):

]v[Superstition saw

Something it had never seen before: Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,

Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

]sou[(ll.11-14).

But the power of Cullen’s imagery is no less compelling.

]p[Like the communal speaker of Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask,” moreover, Cullen’s speaker

knows how to “hide the heart that bleeds” (l.13). His darkness, however, is a fecund one, for in

it, “agonizing seeds” offer a potentially more promising harvest than the one at the beginning of

the sonnet. Cullen uses the same themes of farming and theft as Arna Bontemps and Sterling

Brown do in “A Black Man Talks of Reaping” (1926) and “Salutamus” (1927). Although the

outcome of “From the Dark Tower” may differ from Bontemps’ poem in only a minor way, the

splendor of Cullen’s night does offer a note of hope that is missing in Bontemps’ quatrains but

present in the sestet of Brown’s “Salutamus” (“lads as brave again / Will plant and find a fairer

crop than ours”) (ll.10–11). While the last phrase of Bontemps’ poem is “bitter fruit” (l.12),

Cullen ends instead with “agonizing seeds” (l.14) that strain to grow new shoots and that “will,

in time, produce for the speaker and not for others” (Weil 227).

]p[Claude McKay wrote many stirring political sonnets. Not all of them appear in Harlem

Shadows (1922), but many of his most familiar ones are featured there, from the thrilling

contradictions of “America” and the bitter sense of placelessness in “Outcast” and “Enslaved,” to

the sympathetic portrait of “The Harlem Dancer” and the blistering depiction of racial terrorism

in “The Lynching,” and finally to the famous ringing tones of “If We Must Die.” A slightly

earlier sonnet that is just as good, “Samson” (1920), recounts the story of the biblical figure in

the first two quatrains of the sonnet and then applies it in the last six lines to the contemporary

scene in a way that parallels Dunbar’s appeal to Frederick Douglass for inspiration and guidance

in the midst of contemporary conflict. McKay is more emphatic and head-on, however. For he

rounds out his sonnet with a direct address to his contemporaries instead of evoking a

predecessor: “O sable Samsons, in white prisons bound,” he commands,

]v[Put forth your swarthy hands: the pillars found,

Strain mightily at them until at length

The accursed walls, reared of your blood and tears,

Come crashing, sounding freedom in your ears.

]sou[(ll.9, 10–14)

This part of the poem shares some of the militancy of “If We Must Die,” but it also infuses the

call to action with a historical resonance that enriches and deepens the poem’s perspective. In

particular, McKay’s treatment of the walls as products of unfree black labor and as a collective

symbol of psychological repression transfers the story of Samson’s revenge to the plight of his

black contemporaries in a dramatically exciting way.

]p[“Samson” recalls an 1842 poem by Longfellow, “The Warning,” which adapts the same story

to antebellum America to criticize the moral scandal of slavery. The final stanza of “The

Warning” explains its title:

]v[There is a poor, blind Samson in this land,

. . .

Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,

And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,

Till the vast Temple of our liberties

A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.

]sou[(ll.13, 15–18)

McKay echoes the idea of black Samson’s blindness, but he also enriches Longfellow’s use of

the story with his reference to “your hidden strength,” which not only appeals to the

psychological resources of blacks, but also extends the blindness to racist whites who fail to

recognize the worth of their fellow black citizens. Like Longfellow, McKay pays out his

sentence over several lines. In “The Warning,” this creates suspense, while in “Samson,” the

lines build to a stirring rhetorical climax through parallel imperatives (“Put forth”; “Strain

mightily”), dramatic caesurae which enhance the rhythm of succeeding phrases, and the

culminating hard-c sounds in “accursed walls” and “Come crashing.” McKay updates the story,

but his poem also points to the fact that not enough had changed between Longfellow’s day and

his own.

]p[In “America,” McKay both opposes American racism and revels in the “vigor” (l.5) of the

country’s “cultured hell” (l.4). He is simultaneously enthralled by her “bigness” (l.7) and ready

to be “a rebel . . . / . . . within her walls” (ll.8–9). The last four lines correspond to the crashing

walls at the end of “Samson,” but they also bring to mind Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:

]v[Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,

And see her might and granite wonders there,

Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,

Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

]sou[(ll.11–14)

While McKay admires America’s “might and granite wonders,” he also puts them into

perspective by adopting Shelley’s long-term view of the “Mighty” (l.11), where “a shattered

visage lies” (l.4) in the sinking sands of time. McKay further enriches the historical resonance of

his dark vision by echoing Wordsworth’s “unimaginable touch of Time” (the last line of

“Mutability”).

]p[In the ebullient “The Rites for Cousin Vit” (1945), Gwendolyn Brooks celebrates the

distinctive personality of Cousin Vit in a way that recalls Helene Johnson’s “Sonnet to a Negro

in Harlem.” Ostensibly about a funeral, Brooks’ sonnet moves quickly to the living energy of the

deceased woman, first through the claim that the casket “can’t hold her / That stuff and satin

aiming to enfold her” (ll.2–3). By lines 5 and 6, in fact, Vit “rises in the sunshine,” alive in the

mind of the speaker, who savors the memory of Vit’s vivacious quirky spunk. As Stacy Carson

Hubbard argues, “The poem’s project is the creation, or recreation, of the woman, her

resurrection, like that of some parodic Christ more snakily subversive than holy” (60). The

sonnet is strewn with excess: “Too much. Too much” (l.5); “Too vital and too squeaking” (l.9). It

ends on an emphatic “Is,” a stative verb charged with exciting energy and celebrating the essence

of the woman it honors. The slant rhyme on her flamboyant “hiss” emphasizes all the more her

off-kilter and irrepressible joie de vivre. “Exuberance is beauty,” as Blake puts it in The

Marriage of Heaven and Hell (64). Like Johnson, Brooks uses the highly rhetorical form of the

sonnet to celebrate the distinctive being of an individual. According to Hubbard, in fact, Brooks

sees “the boxing of vitality essential to the achievement of form . . . as both a sacrifice and a

process of self-creation and self-definition” (61). In a society that denigrated blackness as a

matter of course, this cultural work is both a moral achievement and an admirable artistic feat.

More personal than the formal poems about public figures by Dunbar, McKay, and Hayden,

these character profiles occupy an equally important role in African American sonnets.

]p[Hayden himself offers one of these profiles in “The Performers,” which celebrates the

extraordinary qualities of ordinary people. Grouped into an octave and sestet, but without strict

end-rhymes, the charming speaker of this poem admires the work of window-cleaners with grace

and gentle humor by contrasting his own imagination with their daily exploits. The first sentence,

which is gingerly distributed over five lines, aptly imitates the workmen’s assured and artful

movements:

]v[Easily, almost matter-of-factly, they step,

two minor Wallendas, with pail and squeegee along

the wintry ledge . . .

and leaning back into a seven-story angle of space

begin washing the office windows.

]sou[(ll.1–5)

The first four commas subtly break up the action, which helps readers feel what it is like to be up

on the “wintry ledge” with the men, but also to notice how routine this work is for them, and

how efficient and nonchalant they are in performing it. The speaker reveals his admiration for

them when he briefly imagines himself among them, but by the sestet, he’s “safely back at [his]

desk”—presumably performing his own work as a writer (l.9). The lines of Hayden’s sonnet

perform their own graceful balancing act to praise the work of these men. Recognizing their

labor as “a risky business,” he offers thanks to the men in the penultimate line of the poem. “The

Performers” ends with a surprising final flourish when “one of the men” thanks the speaker in

return (14). Hayden winks with amusement at the reader by indicating the importance of his

work as a poet, which pays homage to the ordinary labors of the men the poem describes,

thereby affirming their worth and dignity. The workman’s responsive “Thank you” also reminds

readers that the poet himself is one of the performers identified in the title. Poetry honors the

artful in the ordinary, bringing into view parallel forms of work that would otherwise go

unnoticed.

]p[In the 1949 sonnet sequence “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” Brooks weds the personal and the public

in a significant way, so that her sequence builds on both the sonnet heritages I have briefly

outlined above. By calling attention to the color bar in the military during World War II, the

sequence reminds readers of fundamental social injustice. As Ann Folwell Stanford puts it, “in

these poems, Brooks reconstructs ‘The Enemy’ not as foreigners holding howitzers, but as fellow

Americans with white skin” (197). However, by imagining her way into the thought-world of

black soldiers in several sonnets of the sequence, Brooks also gives her readers access to the

private life of men experiencing not only combat but also racism and segregation within the

ranks. The second sonnet of the sequence (“Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity”), for

instance, expresses a clear concern with the dignity of the individual black soldier. Focusing on

the body as an expression of selfhood, the poem stakes a claim for the unique worth of each

individual by insisting that “Each body has its art, its precious prescribed / pose” (ll.1–2).

]p[Just as earlier African American sonneteers offered tributes to important public figures, Rita

Dove pays homage to the painter Frida Kahlo in “Sonnet in Primary Colors” (1995). Dove writes

that Kahlo “painted herself a present,” which can mean (a) that she gave herself a self-portrait,

(b) painted herself as a gift to her viewers, and (c) depicted a meaningful present moment

through a powerful act of will and imagination. Like the simple, self-reflexive “This” that opens

Dove’s sonnet, these meanings offer an aesthetics that Dove celebrates in the painter but also

claims for her own work. “Sonnet in Primary Colors” therefore shares the aesthetic concerns of

Hayden’s “The Performers.”

]p[Dove portrays Kahlo as a winged woman with a heavy single eyebrow (“the woman with one

black wing / perched over her eyes” [1–2]), a prominent feature of Kahlo’s many self-portraits.

Dove’s description corresponds to the butterflies in the last stanza, so that the resurrection

symbolism in Kahlo’s bedstead-altar to the heroes of communism is also embodied in her own

being. In the sestet, Kahlo’s sometime-husband Diego Rivera’s love-skull contrasts with the

butterfly image. It is a memento mori “in the circular window / of the thumbprint” of Kahlo’s

own skull, the thumbprint “searing her immutable brow” (13–14). A thumbprint is an identifying

personal mark, though in this case it seems to bear the stamp of Rivera’s imagination, perhaps

both as an inspiration and a dark mark of mortality, like the ashes smeared on the foreheads of

believers on Ash Wednesday. The circular window may be a kind of third eye, representing the

imaginative vision which Kahlo’s stark and moving self-portraits embody. This interpretation

corresponds to the fact that Frida is heroically “erect,” proudly upright. The sestet’s repetition of

rose shows how she woke from sleep and from a thousand daily deaths (“rose to the celluloid

butterflies of her Beloved Dead / . . . And rose to her easel”) (ll.8, 11). The artist manages to

stand tall despite her injured spine, which Dove characterizes as a “flaming pillar” and which

Kahlo depicted as a Greek column in a 1944 self-portrait, La columna rota (The Broken

Column).

]p[This sonnet celebrates Kahlo’s heroic individualism in the face of crippling pain and the

enormous power of her art. In a way that corresponds to Brooks’ death and resurrection

symbolism in “The Rites for Cousin Vit,” the butterfly metaphor and the repetition of the act of

rising, along with the word “immutable” in the last line, underscore Kahlo’s vitality through a

rebirth motif and an emphasis on the lasting power of her art. Dove only uses the personal names

of the artists in her poem, suggesting not only that Kahlo’s fame is great enough that her first

name suffices to identify her, but also that the stamp of the personal is foremost in her life and

painting. Because the sonnet clearly refers to the many self-portraits Kahlo produced, the poem

also pays homage to her distinctive personal identity as it defines and expresses itself in the

richly vivid details of her paintings. Like the singular personalities of Helene Johnson’s “Sonnet

to a Negro in Harlem” and Brooks’ “Rites for Cousin Vit,” Kahlo’s specificity is at the heart of

Dove’s “Sonnet in Primary Colors.” The primacy of Kahlo’s imagination strongly registers in the

prism of Dove’s sonnet, whose form bears the inimitable contours of the personal.

]p[As in Brooks’ “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” moreover, in “History” Dove focuses on the

interaction between the personal and the public. This poem offers a context for imagining the

interaction between personal experience and the public arena so that both can be valued equally:

“Everything’s a metaphor, some wise / guy said, and his woman nodded, wisely” (ll.1–2).

Although the opening lines of the poem make a claim that the rest of the sonnet takes seriously,

they are marked by a tongue-in-cheek tone. The wise-mouth speaker wonders,

]v[Why was this such a discovery

to him? Why did history

happen only on the outside?

]sou[(ll.3–5)

The wit lingers in the disbelief of the speaker’s subsequent questions: the wise at the end of the

first line turns into a succession of whys, splintering off into challenging questions that reframe

the meaning of metaphor, language, and history. The female speaker is more wise than the man

she thinks about because her insight about metaphor is a home truth that she feels in her bones.

The more abstract, “outside” view of history is presumptuous because it tends to see this view as

the “only” one. This official and abstracting view of history, the speaker shows, precludes

experiential ones, remaining blind to the value of the immediate, the perceptual, the instinctive,

the imagined, and the maternal. Everyday “inside” history, on the other hand, is the stuff of lived

experience, the domain of dream and desire. And it is vitally real for the individual who

experiences it.

]p[Marilyn Nelson and Natasha Trethewey address history in more recent sonnet sequences. In

the case of Nelson, I examine a poem about an ancestor, “Chosen,” and her crown of sonnets

called A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005). In the case of Trethewey, I discuss “Native Guard”

(2006), her sequence of ten sonnets in the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of the same name.

The interwoven sonnets by Nelson and Trethewey, moreover, recall the interwoven sequence

(“Her Island”) that closes Dove’s Mother Love (1995).

]p[In “Chosen” and A Wreath for Emmett Till, Nelson shows how history is interior as well as

“outside,” private as well as public. In “Chosen,” Nelson tells a story of personal terror and joy

that has the power of a fable because it represents the experience of many enslaved women.

While it may be inaccurate to claim that the sonnet portrays the violence at its heart as a felix

culpa, it is nonetheless true that the poem insists upon the surprisingly joyful outcome of a

horrifying experience:

]v[Diverne wanted to die, that August night

his face hung over hers, a sweating moon.

. . .

If she had died, her one begotten son,

her life’s one light, would never have been born.

]sou[(ll.1–2 and 4–5)

Nelson welds the terror and pain caused by a slaveholder’s rape of her ancestor Diverne to the

tender joy Diverne feels at the birth of her son. And since the son, Pomp Atwood, is Nelson’s

forebear, the poet shows how intimately intertwined her family is with that of a menacing

whiteness. Referring to Diverne and her rapist Master Tyler, Nelson ends her sonnet with these

lines:

]v[Pomp was their

share of the future. And it wasn’t rape.

In spite of her raw terror. And his whip.

]sou[(ll.12–14)

Nelson equally stresses the felicity of Diverne’s love for her newborn son and the culpability of

Master Tyler. In fact, while “Chosen” and “one begotten son” are messianic terms applied to

mother and child, the last fierce words of the poem (“her raw terror” and “his whip”) focus on

Diverne’s violation (l.14). The slant rhyme of “whip” and “rape” in the closing couplet belies the

denial in the penultimate line (“it wasn’t rape”).

]p[Nelson published A Wreath for Emmett Till in 2005, the fiftieth anniversary of Till’s murder.

In a brief preface, Nelson describes the form of her poem:

]ex[A crown of sonnets is a sequence of interlinked sonnets in which the last line of one becomes

the first line, sometimes slightly altered, of the next. A heroic crown of sonnets is a sequence of

fifteen interlinked sonnets, in which the last one is made of the first lines of the preceding

fourteen. (Wreath)

Although she does not refer to John Donne, Nelson’s use of the crown-form and of Christian

religious imagery recalls Donne’s sequence of seven Holy Sonnets, which he entitled La Corona.

]p[In the preface, Nelson also identifies herself in a personal way with the tragedy of Till’s

murder: “I was nine years old when Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. His name and history

have been a part of most of my life.” In the second sonnet of the sequence, she plays upon the

theme of memory by comparing herself to a tree: “. . . I remember, like a haunted tree / set off

from other trees in the wildwood” (ll.3–4). In a note, Nelson explains that her simile echoes Paul

Laurence Dunbar’s poem “The Haunted Oak,” which is also a poem about lynching. The idea of

painful but responsive remembering is a central one in the sequence, and Nelson expands and

strengthens the impact of that idea through the allusions which connect this sonnet and the entire

sequence with a wider cultural history, including not just Dunbar’s poem but also “Strange

Fruit,” the song about lynching Billie Holiday made famous:

]v[If trees could speak, it could

describe . . .

the strange fruit that still ghosts its reverie.

]sou[(ll.5–7)

]p[Nelson revisits and enriches her allusion to Dunbar’s poem by situating it in a long-range and

organic view of history embodied by the tree metaphor in the eleventh sonnet of her wreath:

]v[Thousands of oak trees around this country

groaned with the weight of men slain for their race,

their murderers acquitted in almost every case.

]sou[(ll.2–4)

Through the language of flowers in the first line of this sonnet (trillium, Queen Anne’s Lace) and

in many others in the sequence, Nelson commemorates Till’s youth. Through the oak tree

metaphor, she situates his murder within the wider context of other lynchings. Till is portrayed as

a Christ figure in the sequence (an idea the illustrator Philippe Lardy reinforces near the center of

the book with a tondo of Till’s face framed by a bird’s nest made of thorns and chains), and

Nelson imagines an alternate history of his life that aims to redeem his tragic death. Her most

compelling effort to honor him comes in a call to remember his murder in the penultimate sonnet

of the sequence:

]v[People may disappear, leaving no trace,

unless we stand before the populace,

orators denouncing the slavery

to fear.

]sou[(ll.4–7)

Nelson challenges her readers to respond to Till’s murder by recognizing its relationship to other

tragedies in other places (like the “disappeared” peoples of Latin America) and by perpetuating

the tradition of great African American oratory that sought to defeat slavery and other forms of

racial injustice. Nelson’s reference to oratory functions as a metaphor for her poem and for

African American culture in general, particularly by reminding her readers of such great black

speakers as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. Without

explicitly naming these individuals, she aligns herself with them and with their verbal artistry.

Like Dunbar and Hayden in their tributes to Douglass, she evokes the charismatic authority of

such speakers. Like the sonnets celebrating individuality by Johnson, Hayden, Brooks, and

Dove, Nelson’s sequence pays homage to the dignity of an individual.

]p[In a brief sequence of his own, Yusef Komunyakaa also focuses on the connection between

“outside” public history and the inner history of the self. In “History Lessons,” from Magic City

(1992), he shows how history is learned through the lived experience of stories and angry

incidents. All three of the sonnets in the sequence are about lynchings. The last sonnet refers to

Emmett Till, which connects the speaker’s personal world to the public history of lynching. The

reference to Till also connects Nelson’s sequence to Komunyakaa’s. Komunyakaa frames his

accounts as direct personal experience: the “I” of each sonnet hears the story of a lynching or, in

the case of the last sonnet, personally reacts to the racist baiting of a “pick-up man from

Bogalusa Dry Cleaners” (l.30). When the man tells the woman whose fresh dresses he is

delivering, “Emmett Till had begged for it / With his damn wolf whistle,” the speaker says,

]v[The hot words

Swarmed out of my mouth like African bees

& my fists were cocked,

Hammers in the air.

]sou[(ll.32–39)

After the deliveryman hastily departs, the speaker tells us that the woman “pulled me into her

arms / & whispered, Son, you ain’t gonna live long” (41–42). This protective maternal warning

dramatizes the personal impact of history in a way that unites the personal and the public

viscerally, by showing the “inside of history” as it plays itself out in the speaker’s development.

Whether lover (“cocked”) or mother-figure (“Son”), the woman’s action in the closing lines

protect the speaker in a way that reverses Emmett Till’s situation, who was far from his mother

and home when he was murdered. The reversal doesn’t undo or erase the bitterness of Till’s

murder, but it does resist the violence of its legacy, even as the irony of the poem reminds

readers that the violent potential of racism continues to be a threat.

]p[Natasha Trethewey shows herself to be equally concerned with the personal and communal in

“Native Guard,” her sequence commemorating black Civil War soldiers in Louisiana. Since the

sequence imitates a journal, each sonnet is subtitled with a date. Trethewey foregrounds the role

of writing and observation as a metaphor for the special work of the black poet in a way that

corresponds to Nelson’s focus on oratory near the end of A Wreath for Emmett Till. More

broadly, her speaker also echoes the artist-figures in Dove’s “Sonnet in Primary Colors” and

Hayden’s “The Performers.” Trethewey makes her readers aware of the special importance of

writing through the palimpsest image of her speaker’s cross-hatched journal and through her

emphasis on his work as a writer of letters on behalf of others (“February 1863” and “March

1863”). Trethewey makes her speaker even more of a poet-figure when he emphasizes his role as

a reporter (“I now use ink / to keep record” [“November 1862,” ll.11–12]), observer (“I studied

natural things . . . / Now I tend Ship Island graves” [“August 1864,” ll.4, 9]), and especially as a

witness:

]v[I’m told

it’s best to spare most detail, but I know

there are things which must be accounted for.

]sou[(“August 1824,” ll.12–14)

]p[In the second sonnet, “December 1862,” Trethewey’s soldier refers to the journal he

appropriates, which is

]v[ near full

with someone else’s words, overlapped now,

crosshatched beneath mine. On every page,

his story intersecting with my own.

]sou[(ll.11–14)

The soldier’s “intersecting” journal entries symbolize the intertwining of racial history in

American culture. It is a historical symbol in the sequence, but it corresponds to the personal fact

of Trethewey’s mixed ancestry, which she addresses more directly in other poems in the volume.

(The cover of the book, moreover, reproduces an actual diary page by Colonel Nathan W.

Daniels, the historical basis for the journal in Trethewey’s poem.)

]p[Trethewey compounds the significance of the crosshatched journal in “January 1863,” the

fourth sonnet in the sequence, when her speaker makes this entry in his journal:

]v[Later , as we worked,

I joined in the low singing someone raised

. . .

It was then a dark man

removed his shirt, revealed the scars, crosshatched

like the lines in this journal, on his back.

]sou[(ll.4–5 and 7–9)

By figuring the slave’s scars as a bodily text (a trope already signaled in the first sonnet when the

speaker contrasts his own whip-scars with the words he writes in his journal), Trethewey invites

her readers to view her poetry as a form of testimony, a testimony that both commemorates the

brutalization of black bodies throughout American history and triumphs in the power of words to

express and remember personal and historical experience.

]p[Wanda Coleman does something similar in “American Sonnet (10)” from Hand Dance

(1993). Like Nelson’s “Chosen,” her poem pays homage to ancestral motherhood, but it includes

the Middle Passage and masses of women in the epic sweep of its vision:

]v[our mothers wrung hell and hardtack

from row and boll. fenced others’

gardens with the bones of lovers.

]sou[(ll.1–3)

The rhythm and sound effects of the first two lines convey the hard physical labor of the mothers

Coleman commemorates, while the imagery of “bones” (l.3) and “Moloch’s mansions” (l.9)

figure slavery as a form of systematic murder. Coleman’s “seeds of blight” (l.8) also echo the

metaphor in Cullen’s “From the Dark Tower” and Brown’s “Salutamus,” reminding her readers

of the central but devastating role that slaves played in the creation of national wealth. Her poem

ends with a testimonial vision that corresponds to Hayden’s visionary Douglass and Nelson’s

plea to remember Emmett Till: “our hungered eyes do see/refuse the dark” (9–12).

]p[As I suggested in the introduction, this essay addresses only a sample of the many sonnets

published by African American writers. By identifying such key concerns as the dignity of the

individual, the analogy between black oratory and poetry, and the political and more personal

traditions of the sonnet in black culture, I have tried to show some of the inspired and innovative

ways in which African American poets have adapted the sonnet form. Interested readers may

explore sonnets by writers I have not discussed, such as Alice Dunbar Nelson, Anne Spencer,

Melvin Tolson, Gwendolyn Bennett, Margaret Walker, James A. Emanuel, Gerald Barrax, Jay

Wright, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Michael Harper, Sonia Sanchez, Ed Roberson, Afaa M.

Weaver, Cornelius Eady, Carl Phillips, Elizabeth Alexander, Camille T. Dungy, and Wendy S.

Walters in such anthologies as Caroling Dusk (Cullen), Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep (Harper and

Walton), The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry (Rampersad and Herbold), and

Black Nature (Dungy), as well as in many individual volumes, some of which are listed in the

bibliography.

]x[References and Further Reading

]bib[Alexander, Elizabeth. “Today’s News.” The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.

Ed. Arnold Rampersad and Hilary Herbold. New York: Oxford, 2006. 1.

]bib[Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987.

]bib[Brown, Sterling. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown. Ed. Michael S. Harper.

Evanston: Triquarterly Books–Northwestern University Press, 1996.

]bib[Clifton, Lucille. Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–2000. Rochester, NY:

BOA Editions, 2000.

]bib[Coleman, Wanda. Hand Dance. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1993.

]bib[Cullen, Countee. My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writing of Countee Cullen, Voice of

the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Gerald Early. New York: Anchor–Doubleday, 1991.

]bib[Dove, Rita. Mother Love. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.

]bib[Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Ed. Joanne M.

Braxton. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993.

]bib[Dungy, Camille T. Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.

Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.

]bib[Harper, Michael S. Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems. Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1977.

]bib[Harper, Michael S. and Anthony Walton, eds. Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of

Poetry by African Americans since 1945. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1994.

]bib[Hayden, Robert. Collected Poems. Ed. Frederick Glaysher. New York: Liveright, 1985.

]bib[Hubbard, Stacy Carson. “‘A Splintery Box’: Race and Gender in the Sonnets of Gwendolyn

Brooks.” Genre 25 (1992): 47–64.

]bib[Johnson, Helene. This Waiting for Love. Ed. Verner D. Mitchell. Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2000.

]bib[Jordan, June. Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Ed. Jan Heller Levi

and Sara Miles. Copper Canyon Press, 2005.

]bib[Komunyakaa, Yusef. Pleasure Dome. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

]bib[McKay, Claude. Complete Poems. Ed. William J. Maxwell. Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 2004.

]bib[Nelson, Marilyn. The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana

State University Press, 1997.

]bib[Nelson, Marilyn. A Wreath for Emmett Till. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

]bib[Phillips, Carl. From the Devotions. St. Paul, MO: Graywolf Press, 1998.

]bib[Sanchez, Sonia. Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems. Boston, MA: Beacon

Press, 1999.

]bib[Sherman, Joan R. Collected Black Women’s Poetry. Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1988.

]bib[Stanford, Ann Folwell. “Dialectics of Desire: War and the Restive Voice in Gwendolyn

Brooks’s ‘Negro Hero’ and ‘Gay Chaps at the Bar.’” African American Review 26.2

(1992): 197–211.

]bib[Tolson, Melvin. “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson. Ed. Raymond

Nelson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.

]bib[Trethewey, Natasha. Native Guard. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

]bib[Weil, Eric A. “Personal and Public: Three First-Person Voices in African American

Poetry.” In The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, ed. Joanne V. Gabbin.

Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. 223-38.

]bib[Wright, Jay. Transformations. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2000.

]x[Notes

1 Henrietta Cordelia Ray also published a sonnet on Shaw. According to Joan R. Sherman, Ray’s

collection, Sonnets, was published in 1893 (Sherman xxix).

2 While the slogan “black is beautiful” is associated with the 1960s and 1970s, its application to

the 1920s is not an anachronism. In “The New Negro” (1925), Alain Locke writes about a new

racial consciousness and pride in the 1920s, and to show this, he quotes the work of several

contemporary poets, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and James Weldon Johnson.

Locke published his essay together with the work of many contemporary black writers, including

Countee Cullen, in the March 1925 special issue of Survey Graphic. “Beautiful” is a key word in

Langston Hughes’s 1923 poem “My People”: “The night is beautiful / So the faces of my

people” (1–2). The word appears in all three of the poem’s stanzas.