The son of a teacher and a luxury-hotel headwaiter, James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) learned early the value of education and professional distinction. The classical formation he received at the historically black Atlanta University at the end of the nineteenth century was to him not only a means of advancement, but also a kind of anointing. On the landscape of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson figures as an actual Renaissance Man, serving variously as activist, teacher, lawyer, and — in collaboration with his composer brother, John Rosamond Johnson— poet-librettist. We remember him, of course, as a public poet, the author of the anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” but today’s Poem of the Day selection reveals a private tenderness. Here Johnson renders, in loosely metered paragraph stanzas, the new father’s conflict: identifying his male child as a smaller self, but loath to wish on this new and separate person his own particular battles.  

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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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.