Content area
Full Text
A hush is over all the teeming lists,
And there is pause, a breathspace in the strife;
A spirit brave has passed beyond the mists
And vapors that obscure the sun of life.
And Ethiopia, with bosom torn,
Laments the passing of her noblest born. - Paul Laurence Dunbar,
"Frederick Douglass" ll. 1-6)
Quietly, this stanza begins Paul Laurence Dunbar's long elegy for Frederick Douglass. Here, Dunbar's speaker solemnly utters sentiments that suggest Douglass's importance within the context of an American narrative of race. As well, he prophesies a kind of racial deliverance toward which Douglass's political activities had moved the black race, indeed the black nation. Language, trope, and affect are sifted through a mother's loss, a loss felt by the black race, a loss felt (perhaps) by all of Dunbar's readers. The tension between individual and collective loss becomes important to how we read this early African American elegy, as Dunbar mines multiple literary and cultural traditions to find the language that befits his purpose of marking the passage of such a great black leader. With the skill of his dialect poems, he turns to established literary forms-imbuing them with racial pride and literary virtuosity.
What he imagines as Douglass's passing is the trope of the death of the race's "noblest born," which he thematizes as both matrilineal and intergenerational. By figuring "Ethiopia" as Douglass's mother, an argument about racial identity ensues; the black race is that maternal essence that Douglass's presence had embodied. His absence, nonetheless, speaks to the urgency of racial identity: the Ethiopianism of this passage, to relish a term from Wilson Moses, speaks to an emerging sense of blacks as belonging to a black nation whose experiences are foretold in biblical prophecy. Blacks will triumph, as Biblical myth forecasts. Yet 1895, the year of Douglass's death, marks a bleak moment in black history. The work of the poem is to convince Dunbar's readers that the black generations from which Douglass's leadership issues will continue even without him. And Dunbar insists those generations will persist because of him: "still thy voice is ringing o'er the gale." Dunbar, in fact, is able to initiate a tradition of African American elegy. His poems of the late nineteenth century inspire a tradition that...