Today’s Poem: A Poet to His Baby Son

Cursed with his father’s mind

Baby wearing a christening gown, c. 1900 (Wikimedia Commons)

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A Poet to His Baby Son

by James Weldon Johnson

Tiny bit of humanity, 
Blessed with your mother’s face,    
And cursed with your father’s mind. 
I say cursed with your father’s mind, 

Because you can lie so long and so quietly on your back,    
Playing with the dimpled big toe of your left foot,    
And looking away, 
Through the ceiling of the room, and beyond. 
Can it be that already you are thinking of being a poet?
 
 Why don’t you kick and howl,    
And make the neighbors talk about    
“That damned baby next door,”    
And make up your mind forthwith    
To grow up and be a banker 
Or a politician or some other sort of go-getter    
Or—?—whatever you decide upon,    
Rid yourself of these incipient thoughts    
About being a poet. 

For poets no longer are makers of songs,    
Chanters of the gold and purple harvest,    
Sayers of the glories of earth and sky,    
Of the sweet pain of love 
And the keen joy of living; 
No longer dreamers of the essential dreams,    
And interpreters of the eternal truth,    
Through the eternal beauty. 
Poets these days are unfortunate fellows.    
Baffled in trying to say old things in a new way    
Or new things in an old language,    
They talk abracadabra 
In an unknown tongue, 
Each one fashioning for himself 
A wordy world of shadow problems, 
And as a self-imagined Atlas, 
Struggling under it with puny legs and arms,    
Groaning out incoherent complaints at his load. 
 
My son, this is no time nor place for a poet;    
Grow up and join the big, busy crowd    
That scrambles for what it thinks it wants    
Out of this old world which is — as it is — 
And, probably, always will be.
 
Take the advice of a father who knows:    
You cannot begin too young    
Not to be a poet. 
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On the landscape of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) figured as a Renaissance Man, serving variously as activist, teacher, lawyer, diplomat, and — in collaboration with his composer brother, John Rosamond Johnson — poet-librettist. We remember him as a public poet, most famously the author of the anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Today’s Poem, by contrast, engages in a more intimate oration.

As the title indicates, the poem’s speaker addresses his baby son, shaping as an infant contemplative. Far better, says this father, to “kick and howl / and make the neighbors talk about / “That damned baby next door,” than to be a poet-in-the-making. Better to be ordinary and annoying than a visionary: precisely the kind of thing parents often say, with the intention of being overheard, when convinced that their child is in fact a genius.

But what’s wrong with poetry as a vocation? Let’s say that this baby, studying his toes and looking “away, / Through the ceiling of the room, and beyond,” really is a genius. Let’s say he’s a visionary in whose ear, already, the muses murmur. Why should he aspire, from his cradle, “not to be a poet?” 

James Weldon Johnson, 1900 (Wikimedia Commons)

The poem’s first stanza balances on the edge of song, ending in a classic blues reiteration: “And cursed with your father’s mind / I say, cursed with your father’s mind.” The father is a poet. This is what he does. Yet he puts away the impulse to song, in favor of the more prosaic lecture, in paragraph stanzas of variously-metered lines. 

From the beginning, the father’s impulse seems conflicted — but of course it’s conflicted. Any parent, beholding his or her own child, feels that surge of recognition at meeting something like a second self. It’s a joyful meeting. At the same time, the parent — painfully aware of his or her own failings — fears the child’s repetition of his own mistakes.

In this oration, the poet-father transcends that familiar, personal paradigm. His address to his child communicates both an ars poetica — here are the things poetry is supposed to do: sing songs, dream dreams, give voice to truth — and a critique. In the modern era, a world made for “go-getters,” poetry is a bankrupt art form. The world has bankrupted it. There’s no more beauty to supply the poet with a subject. Instead, he has to go rummaging around his own insides for something to say. Poets have lost their identity as “makers of songs,” so that poetry is no longer good, or poetry.

So, son, the speaker says, knock yourself out to do anything else. Be a banker. Be a politician. “You cannot begin too early / Not to be a poet.” But in all this counsel, it’s hard not to hear the ring of that certainty that whatever parents tell children to do, children will not do. Whatever parents tell children not to do, children will surely do. In a stroke of reverse psychology, this father may outline what’s wrong, with the world and with poetry, both — because in the end they amount to the same thing — and dare his baby not to grow up and fix it. 

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