The world community may be preoccupied with its own attendant success, and so the poet ends this very formal poem with a prayerlike gesture:

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Dunbar seems to posit his ultimate sense of struggle in this poem. Struggle is for the individual, first, the community, second, and the race, third. Each race struggles to partake of the American Dream Walt Whitman sings about so effectively. In a prophetic way Dunbar wrote a variation on this theme when he penned the rondeau-like poem “He Had His Dream.”

He labored hard and failed at last,
His sails too weak to bear the blast,
The raging tempests tore away
And sent his beating bark astray.
But what cared he
For wind or sea!
He said, “The tempest will be short,
My bark will come to port.”
He saw through every cloud a gleam—
He had his dream.

“Dream” is a theme of great importance to African American writers. It was reiterated by Langston Hughes during the Harlem Renaissance, in numerous poems, among them “Mother to Son” and “A Dream Deferred.” This last poem became the signal epigraph for A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s remarkable play about dignity and survival. Thematically, Dream is not a race issue; it is part and parcel of the work of four of our best playwrights: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee.

Dunbar is aware of the social and racial climate of his times, and he says as much in an essay entitled “Recession Never.” Here is the introductory paragraph:

It would seem that the man who sits at his desk in the North and writes about the troubles in the South is very apt to be like a doctor who prescribes for a case he has no chance to diagnose. It would be true in this instance, also, if it were not that what has happened in Georgia has happened in Ohio and Illinois. The race riots in North Carolina were a piece with the same proceedings in the state of Lincoln. The men who shoot the Negro in Hogansville are blood brothers to those who hang him in Urbana, and the deed is neither better nor worse because it happens in one section of the country or other. The race spirit in the United States is not local but general. (The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader, p. 36)

Dunbar is in his element when he approaches the theme of racism and lynching, as in “The Haunted Oak.” In this poem, the personified tree possesses knowledge of the past, present, and future. So even when the speaker questions himself—

Pray, why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?

one already knows the answer. Clearly in this poem Dunbar is not an accommodationist. This poem speaks out against the intimidating and vicious act of lynching. Each stanza is clear and forthright. There is no masking and no disguise.

The same may be said for the poem “The Colored Soldiers,” where Dunbar chronicles the act of being inducted into the service of the country during the Civil War:

So when War, in savage triumph,
Spread abroad his funeral pall—
Then you called the colored soldiers,
And they answered to your call.

At some pains to demonstrate the humanity of these colored soldiers, who are willing to pay the ultimate price for the freedom the minister in “An Ante-Bellum Sermon” so espouses, Dunbar writes:

They were comrades then and brothers,
Are they more or less to-day?
They were good to stop a bullet
And to front the fearful fray.
They were citizens and soldiers,
When rebellion raised its head;
And the traits that made them worthy,—
Ah! those virtues are not dead.

So when Dunbar takes up this subject in the essay “Recession Never,” we can see his commitment to justice and social equality:

The new attitude may be interpreted as saying: “Negroes, you may fight for us, but you may not vote for us. You may prove a strong bulwark when the bullets are flying, but you must stand from the line when the ballots are in the air. You may be heroes in war, but you must be cravens in peace.”

Dunbar was committed to protesting the injustices and wrongs perpetrated on African Americans of his time. He was also committed to celebrating their valor, their worthiness, and their identifiable humanity in “When Dey ’Listed Colored Soldiers,” a poem that seems to have escaped the eyes of many of his severest critics. Here we find a subject similar to that of “The Colored Soldiers.” But in this poem the persona knows the risks of war as well as its expenses. She at once asks the fiancé-fighter not to enlist in this terrible conflict, but he forcefully insists. She says:

Oh, I hugged him, an’ I kissed him, an’ I baiged him not to go;
But he tol’ me dat his conscience, hit was callin’ to him so . . .
But I t’ought of all de weary miles dat he would have to tramp,
An’ I couldn’t be contented w’en dey tuk him to de camp.
W’y my hea’t nigh broke wid grievin’ ’twell I seed him on de street;
Den I felt lak I could go an’ th’ow my body at his feet.

There is still something ruminating in her spirit that tells her war is devastating, and she is more than ever aware of this when the master and his son go off to fight on the Confederate side of the Civil War.