Today’s Poem: In Summer

A summer poem by the posthumous godfather of the Harlem Renaissance

John Constable, The Cornfield, 1826 (Wikimedia Commons)

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In Summer 

by Paul Laurence Dunbar 

Oh, summer has clothed the earth 
In a cloak from the loom of the sun! 
And a mantle, too, of the skies’ soft blue, 
And a belt where the rivers run. 

And now for the kiss of the wind, 
And the touch of the air’s soft hands, 
With the rest from strife and the heat of life, 
With the freedom of lakes and lands. 

I envy the farmer’s boy 
Who sings as he follows the plow; 
While the shining green of the young blades lean 
To the breezes that cool his brow. 

He sings to the dewy morn, 
No thought of another’s ear; 
But the song he sings is a chant for kings 
And the whole wide world to hear. 

He sings of the joys of life, 
Of the pleasures of work and rest, 
From an o’erfull heart, without aim or art; 
’T is a song of the merriest. 

O ye who toil in the town, 
And ye who moil in the mart, 
Hear the artless song, and your faith made strong 
Shall renew your joy of heart. 

Oh, poor were the worth of the world 
If never a song were heard, — 
If the sting of grief had no relief, 
And never a heart were stirred. 

So, long as the streams run down, 
And as long as the robins trill, 
Let us taunt old Care with a merry air, 
And sing in the face of ill.

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Born on this day, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), the first African American poet to attain an international reputation, stood as posthumous literary godfather to the Harlem Renaissance poets of the 1920s and 1930s. Those poets included Anne Spencer (1882–1975), whose 1927 poem “Lifelong, Poor Browning” we featured in April, and Countee Cullen, whom readers will remember as the author of the 1925 “Saturday’s Child,” which appeared here on May 23. 

Dunbar’s “In Summer” makes an interesting trio with Cullen’s and Spencer’s later poems. In Countee Cullen’s poem, we observed a gesture toward the ballad tradition in English poetry, using common-meter stanzas to relay an inverted fairy tale, full of bad luck. We’ve seen, too, how Anne Spencer enlarges, with greater attention to the particulars of a landscape, on the same Romantic impulse that animates Today’s Poem about the beauties of summer, with the soul-renewing power of nature and the joys intrinsic to a pastoral life. 

Dunbar’s farmer boy singing at his plow seems a figure straight out of Wordsworth. But Dunbar’s onlooker’s closest kin is the speaker in Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” who recognizes and longs to be caught up in a joy that eludes him. Characteristically, Hardy’s speaker stops at his own exclusion from the thrush’s song, but Dunbar’s speaker’s resolution, even “in the face of ill,” is to sing anyway. The poem’s insistently cheerful ending seems intended to ward off “old Care,” but also any more complex emotions that might intrude on the speaker’s acknowledgment of those city-bound people who “toil” and “moil,” among whom he seems to number himself in his envy of the singing farmer’s boy.

Paul Dunbar, 1897 (Wikimedia Commons)

As well as engaging the Romantic sensibility, Dunbar makes fuller use than Cullen would later make of the traditional ballad stanza, with its three trimeter lines, its abcb rhyme scheme, and the internal rhyme in the tetrameter c line in each stanza, which is often, though not always, a hallmark of the ballad form (the Cornish poet Charles Causley used it inconsistently, for example). In both form and subject, Dunbar enters the living conversation that is the English poetic tradition, and like Cullen and Spencer, assumes his place in that large tradition. 

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