A Dream Deferred (#poetry)

Advice

Folks, I'm telling you,

birthing is hard

and dying is mean--

so get yourself

a little loving

in between.

 

-Langston Hughes

 

Testimonial

 

If I just had a piano,

if I just had a organ,

if I just had a drum,

how I could praise my Lord!

 

But I don't need no piano

  neither organ

  nor drum

for to praise my Lord!

 

-Langston Hughes

 

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

 

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

 

Or does it explode?

-Langston Hughes

 

I feel like Langston Hughes has been in the air lately. A couple of my regular poetry sources have featured him.

 

Hughes (1901-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and moved to New York City in 1921 for college. (Columbia.) He became an important writer in the Harlem Renaissance. These three poems all come from his volume Montage of a Dream Deferred of 1951, which represents voices heard around Harlem in one 24-hour period. The last one quoted is probably the best known poem of the book. It supplied Lorraine Hansbury the title for her hit play, as well as the title for a poem I've previously quoted on the blog. 

Classics Club Spin #43

 

Once again it's time for a new Classics Club spin. The rules are here but that's old news & the fun is showing off a list of books, so...straight to that!

1.) Willa Cather/Sapphira and the Slave Girl

2.) George Gissing/New Grub Street

3.) Nella Larsen/Passing

4.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry

5.) Jack London/The Iron Heel

6.) Jack London/Martin Eden

7.) Harry Mark Petrakis/A Dream of Kings

8.) Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men

9.) Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding

10.) Mikhail Bulgakov/Heart of a Dog

11.) Simone de Beauvoir/The Mandarins

12.) Joachim Machado de Assis/Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

13.) Benito Perez Galdos/That Bringas Woman

14.) Robert Walser/Jakob von Gunten

15.) John Ruskin/Unto This Last

16.) R. L. Stevenson/An Inland Voyage

17.) Apollonius Rhodius/The Argonautica

18.) Luis Vaz de Camões/The Lusiads

19.) Nezami Ganjavi/Layli and Majnun

20.) Gotthold Lessing/Nathan The Wise

 

These are all from my current Classics Club list. Which look good to you?    

Washing Day

 

from Washing Day

The Muses have turned gossips; they have lost

The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase,

Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse,

In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on,

Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream,

Or droning flies, or shoes lost in the mire

By little whimpering boy, with rueful face --

Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day.

...

Then would I sit me down, and ponder much

Why washings were; sometimes, through hollow hole

Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft

The floating bubbles; little dreaming then

To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball

Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach

The sports of children and the toils of men.

Earth, air, and sky, the ocean hath its bubbles,

And verse is one of them--this most of all.

 

-Anna Laetitia Barbauld

 

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) was a poet, essayist, literary critic, and a pioneering author of children's books. She was from a Dissenting family in the Midlands. 

 

The measure doesn't seem at all 'slip-shod' to me, but quite a solid blank verse. You can decide if you think she's 'prattling on'--I might say yes, but in a very amusing and ironic way. I've only quoted a quarter of the poem--the very beginning and the very end. You can find the entire poem here. The Montgolfier brothers were pioneers of flight by hot-air balloon.

 

I came on this because I recently finished reading Daisy Hay's Dinner With Joseph Johnson, which came out in 2022. Very good! Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) was an important left-wing publisher, also from a Dissenting background, who, in addition to first publishing Barbauld, was also the publisher of Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin (Charles' grandfather), William Cowper, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Johnson published early Wordsworth and Coleridge, and was William Blake's primary employer. (Though Blake published a lot of his own books himself.) Johnson was famous for his weekly dinners--Benjamin Franklin would show up, until the American Revolution got under way, and Franklin left England--and when Johnson was imprisoned for selling books the government didn't like in 1799, he continued the dinners in prison.

 

I don't think I'd ever heard of Anna Laetitia Barbauld before, but part of the poem was quoted in the book--"Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day." and I decided I had to find the rest of it.