Paul Laurence Dunbar.

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                                        Chapter3

                        Paul Laurence Dunbar

            It took the black man centuries and centuries of hard work and perseverance to overcome all the barriers of race and slavery. However, the struggle to extinguish the fire of racism was not only confined to everyday American negro who took it upon himself to fight with his life on the line; black poets stood side by side with black soldiers and attempted to advance the black cause with their most eloquent and poetic language hoping to create a bond among all mankind…a bond that calls for equality among all races…a bond that makes all human beings share a dream…the dream that haunted every individual on planet earth. Black poets who appeared in the 19th century made of their poetry a vehicle to freedom, liberty and equality: their poetry developed new themes that dealt with the old traditional values i.e. history of slavery and racism. One of the most remarkable poets was Paul Laurence Dunbar whose birth in 1872 marked the birth of a new kind of poetry that was:

With my heart's blood imbued

Instinct with passion, tremulously strong

With grief subdued;

Breathing a fortitude

Pain bought.

Laurence Dunbar was the turn- of –the- century poet who was considered a "glowing symbol of African-American literary artistry and an apt representative of his race." His poetry focuses on the themes of captivity and portrays the suffering of the black folks as they were first introduced to America. In his "Ships That Pass At Night", Dunbar is reminiscent of the first slave ship that, solitary and alone, groaned across the black sea freighted with…human cargo on their way to the new world of white dreams. No wonder then that the image of the ship is deeply rooted within the mind of every black man who pictures himself standing on the shore of life reminiscing his old ancestors on a human hell i.e. slave ship that was "crammed with chained men, cramped, crowded together, worn out with suffering- specters of men":

The slave-ship still groaned across the Atlantic, faint cries

burdened the southern breeze, and the great black father

whispered mad tales of cruelties into those young ears. From

the low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play,

and at nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear him

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away to the land of slaves.

In his poem, the "I" is a celebration of every colored man who "stretch[s] my hands imploring, cry aloud" yet "whose voice falls dead a foot from mine lips". Almost all Africans suffered from an innate psychological complex that has rendered him quite unable to distinguish between "dream" and "reality". Blacks were mesmerized into believing in the ideal world of America at a time when they were suffering from bad lifestyle that made them yearn for an escape route from all their troubles and problems. The "ship" provided that escape route. But in ...

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