Poetry Codex

American

James Weldon Johnson

1871–1938

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and became a poet, lyricist, novelist, diplomat and civil-rights leader. He graduated from Atlanta University, studied at Columbia, was admitted to the Florida bar, and served as U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. With his brother J. Rosamond Johnson he wrote songs for the stage, including “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Fifty Years & Other Poems (1917), his first book of verse, marked the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation and gathered formal lyrics, sonnets and a closing group of dialect poems. He later became a leading secretary of the NAACP and a figure of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing God’s Trombones (1927) and editing The Book of American Negro Poetry.

Poems (62)

  1. Fifty Years
  2. To America
  3. O Black and Unknown Bards
  4. O Southland!
  5. To Horace Bumstead
  6. The Color Sergeant
  7. The Black Mammy
  8. Father, Father Abraham
  9. Brothers
  10. Fragment
  11. The White Witch
  12. Mother Night
  13. The Young Warrior
  14. The Glory of the Day Was in Her Face
  15. Before a Painting
  16. I Hear the Stars Still Singing
  17. Girl of Fifteen
  18. The Suicide
  19. Down by the Carib Sea: Sunrise in the Tropics
  20. Down by the Carib Sea: Los Cigarillos
  21. Down by the Carib Sea: Teestay
  22. Down by the Carib Sea: The Lottery Girl
  23. Down by the Carib Sea: The Dancing Girl
  24. Down by the Carib Sea: Sunset in the Tropics
  25. And the Greatest of These Is War
  26. A Mid-Day Dreamer
  27. The Temptress
  28. Ghosts of the Old Year
  29. The Ghost of Deacon Brown
  30. Lazy
  31. Omar
  32. Deep in the Quiet Wood
  33. Voluptas
  34. The Word of an Engineer
  35. Life
  36. Sleep
  37. Prayer at Sunrise
  38. The Gift to Sing
  39. Morning, Noon and Night
  40. Her Eyes Twin Pools
  41. The Awakening
  42. Beauty That Is Never Old
  43. Venus in a Garden
  44. Vashti
  45. The Reward
  46. Sence You Went Away
  47. Ma Lady's Lips Am Like de Honey
  48. Tunk
  49. Nobody's Lookin' but de Owl and de Moon
  50. You's Sweet to Yo' Mammy Jes de Same
  51. A Plantation Bacchanal
  52. July in Georgy
  53. A Banjo Song
  54. Answer to Prayer
  55. Dat Gal o' Mine
  56. The Seasons
  57. 'Possum Song
  58. Brer Rabbit, You's de Cutes' of 'Em All
  59. An Explanation
  60. De Little Pickaninny's Gone to Sleep
  61. The Rivals
  62. If Homely Virtues Draw from Me a Tune

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