The American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), whose June 27 birthday we celebrate today, was the first African American poet to attain an international reputation, and he stood as posthumous literary godfather to the Harlem Renaissance poets of the 1920s and 1930s. Those poets included Anne Spencer (1882–1975), whose 1927  “Lifelong, Poor Browning” the Sun featured last Thursday.

Dunbar’s earlier “In Summer,” today’s Poem of the Day, makes an interesting pairing with Spencer’s later one. We can see how Spencer enlarges, with greater attention to the particulars of a landscape, on the Romantic impulse that animates Dunbar’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, though Wordsworth might have identified himself wholly with the boy, instead of envying him. That stance, the onlooker observing a blitheness of spirit which he recognizes, but in which he cannot participate, is Dunbar’s own. In his translation of the Romantic sensibility into the vernacular of his own experience, as well as his appropriation of the traditional ballad stanza, Dunbar — like the later Spencer — claims his place in the lineage of poetry in English. 

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. 

___________________________________________
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 are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.