Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems , livre ebook

Mint Editions - Claude Mckay

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41 pages

English

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Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) is a poetry collection by Claude McKay. Published toward the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is the first of McKay’s collections to appear in the United States. As a committed leftist, McKay—who grew up in Jamaica—captures the life of African Americans from a realist’s point of view, lamenting their exposure to poverty, racism, and violence while celebrating their resilience and cultural achievement. Several years before T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1923), modernist poet Claude McKay troubles the traditional symbol of springtime to accommodate the hardships of an increasingly industrialized world. In “Spring in New Hampshire,” the poet gives voice to a desperate laborer, for whom the beauty and harmony of the season of rebirth are not only sickening, but altogether inaccessible: “Too green the springing April grass, / Too blue the silver-speckled sky, / For me to linger here, alas, / While happy winds go laughing by, / Wasting the golden hours indoors, / Washing windows and scrubbing floors.” A master of traditional forms, McKay brings his experience as a black man to bear on a poem otherwise dedicated to descriptions of natural beauty, challenging the very tradition his language and style invoke. In “The Lynching,” he calls on the reader to witness the brutality of American racism while exposing the complicity of those who would look without feeling: “[S]oon the mixed crowds came to view / The ghastly body swaying in the sun: / The women thronged to look, but never a one / Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue…” As children dance around the victim’s body, “lynchers that were to be,” McKay raises a terrible, timeless question: how long will such violence endure? With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Claude McKay’s Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers.

Sujets

List of poets from the United States

African American

Poetry

American

Black

Informations

Publié par	Mint Editions
Date de parution	16 novembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781513223506
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems
Claude McKay

Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems was first published in 1920.
This edition published by Mint Editions 2021.
ISBN 9781513299907 | E-ISBN 9781513223506
Published by Mint Editions ®
MintEditionBooks.com
Publishing Director: Jennifer Newens
Design & Production: Rachel Lopez Metzger
Project Manager: Micaela Clark
Typesetting: Westchester Publishing Services

C ONTENTS P REFACE S PRING IN N EW H AMPSHIRE T HE S PANISH N EEDLE T HE L YNCHING T O O . E . A . A LFONSO, D RESSING TO W AIT AT T ABLE, S INGS F LOWERS OF P ASSION T O W ORK M ORNING J OY R EMINISCENCES O N B ROADWAY L OVE S ONG N ORTH AND S OUTH R EST IN P EACE A M EMORY OF J UNE T O W INTER W INTER IN THE C OUNTRY A FTER THE W INTER T HE T ROPICS IN N EW Y ORK I S HALL R ETURN T HE C ASTAWAYS D ECEMBER 1919 F LAME- H EART I N B ONDAGE H ARLEM S HADOWS T HE H ARLEM D ANCER A P RAYER T HE B ARRIER W HEN D AWN C OMES TO THE C ITY T HE C HOICE S UKEE R IVER E XHORTATION

P REFACE
The writer of these verses was born in the Clarendon Hills of Jamaica in 1889. In 1911 he published a small volume in the Negro dialect, and later left for the United States where he worked in various occupations and took courses in Agriculture and English at the Kansas State College. In the spring of this year he visited England to arrange for the publication of his poems.
Claude McKay is a pure blooded Negro, and though we have recently been made aware of some of the more remarkable achievements of African Art typified by the sculpture from Benin, and in music by the Spirituals, this is the first instance of success in poetry with which we in Europe at any rate have been brought into contact. The reasons for this late development are not far to seek, and the difficulties presented by modern literary English as an acquired medium would be sufficient to account for the lacuna; but the poems here selected may, in the opinion of not a few who have seen them in periodical form, claim a place beside the best work that the present generation is producing in this country.
I . A . R ICHARDS
Cambridge, England
September, 1920

S PRING IN N EW H AMPSHIRE
Too green the springing April grass,
Too blue the silver-speckled sky,
For me to linger here, alas,
While happy winds go laughing by,
Wasting the golden hours indoors,
Washing windows and scrubbing floors.
Too wonderful the April night,
Too faintly sweet the first May flowers,
The stars too gloriously bright,
For me to spend the evening hours,
When fields are fresh and streams are leaping,
Wearied, exhausted, dully sleeping.

T HE S PANISH N EEDLE
Lovely dainty Spanish needle
With your yellow flower and white,
Dew bedecked and softly sleeping,
Do you think of me tonight?
Shadowed by the spreading mango,
Nodding o’er the rippling stream,
Tell me, dear plant of my childhood,
Do you of the exile dream?
Do you see me by the brook’s side
Catching crayfish ’neath the stone,
As you did the day you whispered:
Leave the harmless dears alone?
Do you see me in the meadow
Coming from the woodland spring
With a bamboo on my shoulder
And a pail slung from a string?
Do you see me all expectant
Lying in an orange grove,
While the swee-swees sing above me,
Waiting for my elf-eyed love?