Harlem Renaissance Poetry

Harlem Renaissance Poetry

Read the following poems and answer the questions that follow for TWO of your choosing. Be prepared to share your answers with the class. For each response, be sure to justify your thinking with textual evidence.

Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem

You are disdainful and magnificent—
Your perfect body and your pompous gait,
Your dark eyes flashing solemnly with hate,
Small wonder that you are incompetent
To imitate those whom you so despise—
Your shoulders towering high above the throng,
Your head thrown back in rich, barbaric song,
Palm trees and mangoes stretched before your eyes.
Let others toil and sweat for labor’s sake
And wring from grasping hands their need of gold.
Why urge ahead your supercilious feet?
Scorn will efface each footprint that you make.
I love your laughter arrogant and bold.
You are too splendid for this city street.
– Helene Johnson

What words in this poem convey the appearance and personality of the title character?

2. In the context of the poem, would you describe those words as positive or negative? Why?

3. How would you describe the attitude of the speaker of this poem?

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus*
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus**
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
— Countee Cullen

*Tantalus – in Greek mythology, a king whose punishment in the underworld was to stand in water that receded when he tried to drink, and under a fruit tree that receded when he reached for fruit to eat.

**Sisyphus – in Greek mythology, a king condemned to roll a stone up a mountain only to have it roll down again.

What kinds of things does Cullen want God to explain?

2. Why would the poet use the word “quibble”? What do you think he believes about the importance of blindness and death?

3. What do the ancient kings Tantalus and Sisyphus have in common with a black poet?

4. What does the word “awful” mean? Why do you think the poet chose to repeat it?

5. Why does Cullen “marvel”?

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honorus though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Claude McKay

1. In what three animal images does the speaker portray to the oppressors.

2. Why Does the speaker not specify why “we must die”?

3. Why does the speaker argue for a noble death?

4. Why do you think black editors found this poem too radical to publish?

Last Completed Projects