Is this the place for which our fathers sighed?

Tim Woodcock writes: Last week Nancy Quigley offered a poem called “What is Hope?” That prompted me to dig around in the Poetry Foundation’s themed collections of poems, anticipating there would be a section of other poems about hope. There was indeed, although it’s actually labeled “Poems of Hope and Resilience.” It’s well worth a look.

Some of the poems are very well known. For instance, Emily Dickinson’s Poem No. 314, with the line “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers” and Maya Angelou’s widely quoted and inspirational “And Still I Rise.” Among the 50+ poems there are some poems that are – by my lights – incomprehensible or willfully obscure but there’s far greater number of gems, some of which I thought I’d share in an attempt to answer the question, “What is Hope?”

In this blog post I’m going to focus on one poem only, but I plan to return to the theme later on highlighting a couple more poems. The poem that initially caught my eye was the astonishingly powerful “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is often a part of 2PC’s services during Black History Month. While I knew the song, I didn’t know a lot about the context in which it was written. In a note that accompanies the lyrics, James Weldon Johnson - a school principal in Jacksonville, Florida, at the turn of the century - explains how he wrote it as part of celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s legacy in 1900. It was initially performed as a poem and was set to music by Johnson’s brother five years later. It steadily gaining popularity as it spread across the South during the Jim Crow era, until it achieved its status as the “Black National Anthem.”

It must be said that reading words of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in isolation is a little underwhelming, as it lacks the shifts from a major key to a minor key and back again that are so central to the song’s power. (Or perhaps it is that once you’ve heard a poem sung as a song, you cannot fully pay attention to the words, without them activating familiar music that is conspicuous by its absence). But that is not to say that James Weldon Johnson’s words don’t reward a close reading.

The lyrics, so firmly rooted in the Black American experience, never fail to move me: “Stony the road we trod, / Bitter the chastening rod, / Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; / Yet with a steady beat, / Have not our weary feet / Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?”

It is a good question, unsettling in its rawness, making allusions to slavery, both in Biblical times and on American soil in modern times.

But it is a rhetorical question. The author doesn't allow for a disheartened response, no matter how much a negative response to that question may seem justified. The third stanza - sung in a major key and a faster tempo - shifts its focus and thanks “God of our weary years, / God of our silent tears, / Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way.” It resolutely ends, “Shadowed beneath Thy hand, / May we forever stand. / True to our God, / True to our native land.”