Complete Poems
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
PART I - God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
Preface
Listen, Lord—A Prayer
The Creation
The Prodigal Son
Go Down Death—A Funeral Sermon
Noah Built the Ark
The Crucifixion
Let My People Go
The Judgment Day
PART II - Saint Peter Relates an Incident and Fifty Years and Other Poems
Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day
O Black and Unknown Bards
Brothers—American Drama
O Southland!
We to America
Mother Night
The Young Warrior
The White Witch
My City
The Glory of the Day Was in Her Face
Life
The Black Mammy
Fragment
Mother, Farewell!
Girl of Fifteen
The Suicide
Down by the Carib Sea
Deep in the Quiet Wood
Prayer at Sunrise
Her Eyes Twin Pools
Vashti
If I Were Paris
Ghosts of the Old Year
Beauty Never Old
Blessed Sleep
The Greatest of These Is War
A Poet to His Baby Son
Ma Lady’s Lips Am Like de Honey (NEGRO LOVE SONG)
A Plantation Bacchanal
Tunk
Brer Rabbit, You’s de Cutes’ of ’Em All
Answer to Prayer
A Banjo Song
The Rivals
Sence You Went Away
Lift Every Voice and Sing
Envoy
Introduction by Brander Matthews
Fifty Years
To Horace Bumstead
The Color Sergeant
From the German of Uhland
Before a Painting
I Hear the Stars Still Singing
A Mid-Day Dreamer
The Temptress
The Ghost of Deacon Brown
“Lazy”
Omar
Voluptas (I)
The Word of an Engineer
The Gift to Sing
Morning, Noon and Night
The Awakening
Venus in a Garden
Nobody’s Lookin’ But de Owl and de Moon (A NEGRO SERENADE)
You’s Sweet to Yo’ Mammy Jes de Same (LULLABY)
July in Georgy
Dat Gal o’ Mine
The Seasons
’Possum Song
An Explanation
De Little Pickaninny’s Gone to Sleep
PART III - College Years and Other Poems
Moods
A Passing Melody
The River
Helene
The Class of ’94
Grandmother’s Bible
A Dream
Sonnet
Sonnet—The Secret
Class Poem
Voluptas (II)
Optimistic Sam
Mobile Mardi Gras
After My First Week Teaching in the Country
To a Brook Near My School House
A Recollection
The Last Waltz
To a Friend
Only Trust Me
A Brand
Christmas Carol
Miserable
To H.B.
To a Friend, with a Rose
A Heathen
To My Valentine
Ode to Florida
Acknowledgment
The Passionate Lover
Art vs. Trade
The Poet’s Harp
I Love Thee Still
To Louie (I)
A Fragment (I)
Untitled Poem
Untitled Poem
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PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS COMPLETE POEMS
As an educator, lawyer, newspaper publisher, poet, lyricist, diplomat, novelist, and champion for human rights, James Weldon Johnson contributed greatly to American life and world culture.
Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871, to James and Helen Louise Dillet Johnson, he graduated from Atlanta University in 1894, where he was valedictorian. That same year he was appointed principal of Stanton School in Jacksonville. In 1896 he made Stanton the first public high school for blacks in the state of Florida. The following year he founded the Daily American, a daily newspaper serving Jacksonville’s black population, and became the first African American to pass the Florida bar.
Johnson moved to New York in 1902 to form the musical trio, Cole and the Johnson Brothers. During the first years of the twentieth century, the trio had all America singing “Congo Love Song,” “Under the Bamboo Tree,” and “Sence You Went Away.” With the trio, Johnson went on to write the lyrics of more than 200 songs and, with Irving Berlin, Victor Herbert, and John Philip Sousa, he founded the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). A United States diplomat in South and Central America from 1906 to 1913, he returned to New York and became editor of the black weekly newspaper, The New York Age.
After joining the staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1916, he became its chief executive officer in 1920, serving in that capacity for a decade. As an NAACP official, Johnson is credited for making the organization nationally visible, enlarging its membership, and mounting an unprecedented national campaign against lynching.
A prolific writer, his books include Fifty Years and Other Poems, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, The Book of American Negro Poetry, The Books of American Negro Spirituals, Along This Way: An Autobiography, Black Manhattan, Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, and Negro Americans, What Now?
He died on June 26, 1938, as a result of an automobile accident in Wiscassett, Maine. At the time of his death he was serving as professor of creative literature at Fisk University and professor of Negro literature at New York University.
Dr. Sondra Kathryn Wilson, executor of James Weldon Johnson’s literary properties, is an associate of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. Her publications include two volumes of The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson (1995); In Search of Democracy (1999); The Crisis Reader (1999); Opportunity Reader (1999); and The Messenger Reader (2000). With Julian Bond she co-edited Lift Every Voice and Sing: 100 Years, 100 Voices (2000).
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First published in Penguin Books 2000
Copyright The Viking Press, Inc., 1927
Copyright James Weldon Johnson, 1935
Copyright renewed Grace Nail Johnson, 1955, 1963
Copyright © Sondra Kathryn Wilson, Literary Executor of the Estate of
James Weldon Johnson, 2000
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Johnson, James Weldon, 1871-1938.
[Poems]
Complete poems / James Weldon Johnson ; edited with an
introduction by Sondra Kathryn Wilson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-101-17700-6
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To the memory of Grace Elizabeth Nail Johnson (1885-1976)
INTRODUCTION
NAACP OFFICIALS HOSTED a black-tie dinner in the elegant ball-room of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City on the evening of Thursday, May 14, 1931, to honor James Weldon Johnson upon his retirement as leader of the civil rights organization. This affair, probably the most remarkable of its kind in the 1930s, included a diverse gathering of many of the most distinguished and talented people from practically every professional community in America. The power of Johnson’s personality and the range of his achievements were commemorated by those who came to honor him by the moving tributes they paid. The literary critic Carl Van Doren said of the guest of honor: “He is an alchemist—he transformed baser metals into gold.” Johnson had indeed used his brilliance and blackness to transform some of the most obscure expressions of black culture through literature. He elevated and brought those aspects of the black experience into American life and world culture.
One of the best representations of Johnson as an “alchemist” is his most famous work: God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, published in 1927. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written, “God’s Trombones, alone, would have ensured Johnson’s place in the canon.” In this collection of poems, Johnson revealed to the world the creative genius of the unlettered black preachers. These old-time sermonizers were shunned and rebuked even by many of their own race. Johnson understood that many African Americans were ashamed of the so-called ignorant preacher and his exhortations. He explained this in his preface to the work:
The old-time Negro preacher has not yet been given the niche in which he properly belongs. He has been portrayed as a semi-comic figure. He had, it is true, his comic aspects, but on the whole he was an important figure, and at bottom a vital factor.
The following are some lines from the sermon “The Prodigal Son” in God’s Trombones:
Young man—
Young man—
Your arm’s too short to box with God
But Jesus spake in a parable, and he said:
A certain man had two sons
Jesus didn’t give this man a name,
But his name is God Almighty.
And Jesus didn’t call these sons by name,
But ev’ry young man,
Ev’rywhere,
Is one of these two sons .
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