Melvin B. Tolson – The Great Poet

Reading the various blogger reviews of The Great Debaters has me even more pumped to go check it out. Now y’all know that I can’t let all this talk of Melvin B. Tolson go on without reminding folks that, in addition to being an inspirational teacher, he was a great Modernist poet, whose epic poem, The Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, is a milestone of literary modernism¹. Perhaps overshadowed by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, The Libretto is as adventurous, intricate, complex, and learned as Eliot’s masterpiece. In fact, like The Waste Land, without extensive annotation, much of the poem will be lost on the reader. That may be a turn off for some folks, but if it’s not and you haven’t read The Libretto yet, I encourage you to do so.

The following is a section from another of Tolson’s great pieces, “Dark Symphony,” which was published in The Atlantic Monthly and won first place in a poetry contest sponsored by the American Negro Exposition in Chicago a year after the events of The Great Debaters.

II

Lento Grave²

The centuries-old pathos in our voices
Saddens the great white world
And the wizardry of our dusky rhythms
Conjures up shadow-shapes of ante-bellum years:

Black slaves singing One More River to Cross
In the torture tombs of slave-ships,
Black slaves singing Steal Away to Jesus
In jungle swamps
Black slaves singing The Crucifixion
In slave-pens at midnight,
Black slaves singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
In cabins of death,
Black slaves singing Go Down, Moses
In the canebrakes of the Southern Pharaohs.

III

Andante Sostenuto³

They tell us to forget
The Golgotha we tread…
We who are scourged with hate,
A price upon our head.
They who have shackled us
Require of us a song,
They who have wasted us
Bid us condone the wrong.

They tell us to forget
Democracy is spurned.
They tell us to forget
The Bill of Rights is burned.
Three hundred years we slaved,
We slave and suffer yet:
Though flesh and bone rebel,
They tell us to forget!

Oh, how can we forget
Our human rights denied?
Oh, how can we forget
Our manhood crucified?
When Justice is profaned
And plea with curse is met,
When Freedom’s gates are barred,
Oh, how can we forget?

1. Tolson was named Poet Laureate of Liberia in 1947 [↩]
2. From the Italian, “slow and solemn tempo.” [↩]
3. From the Italian, “moderately slow and sustained tempo.” [↩]