African Americans had a brief flowering of liberty and creativity in the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War in the USA. This was brought to a sharp end by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the passing of the Jim Crow laws.
In the 1920’s there was a cultural, social and literary flowering of creativity by the grandchildren of the reconstruction era negroes. Known at the time as the New Negro Movement it is now called the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen was one of the leading lights of this movement.
This poem is interesing to me because it is so evocative of the WB Yeats “He Wishes for the cloths of heaven”. While Yeats wrote of the lovers angst Cullen’s poem speaks of discrimination and racism. Here we are today 100 years on from the Harlem Renaissance and it seems that the struggle for equality for African Americans has seen little advance. Despite the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X the USA still appears to be dangerous ground on which to be a black person.
For a Poet; by Countee Cullen
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold;
Where long will cling the lips of the moth,
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth;
I hide no hate; I am not even wroth
Who found the earth’s breath so keen and cold;
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold.
Mindship 