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 reality, the ship was no Noah's Ark that had saved the souls of millions of people, it was no more than a demon that appeared stealthily at night on the African shores to kidnap many young Africans. Thus, Dunbar's ship is a "ghost" forever "passing…passing into the pregnant night" and which launches memories…bitter memories of the first symbol of their everlasting pain, misery and sorrow. This is why
The Urtext of black culture is neither a word nor a book,
Not an architectural monument on a legal brief. Instead, it
Is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan- a cry not so much
For help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition. The deep black meaning of this cry and moan
goes back to the indescribable cries of Africans on the slave
ship during the transatlantic voyages to America and the indecipherable moans of enslaved Afro-Americans near
god-forsaken creeks.
Thus, the ship is no more the symbol of long-awaited hope or invaluable opportunities, but of despair, darkness and of lost opportunities that "out of sight and sound is passing…passing". In his "ode to Ethiopia", Dunbar presents Ethiopia with the image of a "Mother Race", of a loving mother who encourages hope as well as racial pride. In fact, Ethiopia is a code-word for Africa and the African American who was degraded to exile and darkness, who was "crushed" down by the "pangs" of slavery that loomed large for centuries over the African land. In his writing W.E.B. Du Bois presented his readers with an image of a woman who is no more than
Black Africa,-prostrated, raped and shamed, lies at the feet
of conquering Philistines of Europe. Beyond the awful sea
a black woman weeping and waiting with her sons on her
breast.
In his essay "The Damnation of Women", W.E.B.Du Bois echoed the idea of Africa as a mother:
The father and his worship is Asia, Europe is the precocious
self-centered, forward- striving child, but the land of the
mother is and was Africa…Nor does this all seem to be
solely a survival of the historic matriarchate through which
all nations pass…as if the great black race in passing up
the steps of human culture gave the world…the mother idea.
Dunbar reminisces those "sad days' of slavery when the white invaders came to steal the tranquility and peace of their everyday life…when
Slavery crushed thee with its heel
With thy dear blood all gory.
Dunbar laments those "sad days", yet under that veil of despair
The fruitful seed of better times was growing
The plant of freedom upward sprung,
And spread its leaves so fresh and young.
Dunbar's poem celebrates black culture and black identity as part and parcel of the glory of the past…as the glory of "Ethiopia" that
High 'mid the clouds of fame's bright sky
Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly
And truth shall lift them higher.
To go back to "Ethiopia", to cling to their own roots is the only way for them to know who they really are, and to feel proud of their own heritage and their own "color" that had for centuries separated them from the "light of the day". Even though blacks were degraded and manipulated by the white power, even though the "pangs of slavery" crushed every bone of their bodies, even though their own culture was obliterated and almost forgotten, yet Dunbar encourages his black folks to establish their own sense of identity and to
Be proud, my race, in mind and body
Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll
In characters of fire.
Dunbar's poetry focuses on every American black man who, due to centuries of abusiveness and maltreatment, was left with a broken mentality that rendered him psychologically deranged and mentally alienated. In his "The Paradox", Dunbar exposes the dilemma of all Africans who are no longer sure of their own identity, but who are left to suffer and moan alone on the shore of life:
I am the mother of sorrows
I am the ender of grief
I am the bud and the blossom
I am the late-falling leaf.
Dunbar's "I" represents every black man who tries to assimilate himself into the white heart of America; in the process, he has lost his own identity and become "lost between two realms, he rejected the black heritage and the black society, yet at the same time he failed to identify himself with the American values and standards". Living on the margin of life, Dunbar' black man is both dead and alive; he is both the "bud" and the "falling leaf"….the "serf" and the "king"; he is both the disease and the cure. In short the African American is lost; he is the symbol of the "paradox". In his The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois offers a definition of "double consciousness" which is equivalent to "split personality":
The double consciousness of being both an American
And not an American is referred to [as] internal conflict
in the African American individual between what was
African and what was American.
This concept of "double consciousness" is evident in Dunbar's poem "The Paradox" in which the "I" represents his
Two-ness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring
ideals in one dark body, dogged strength alone keeps
it from being torn asunder.
In the abstract sense, the aforesaid lines reveal the social and psychological impact of America's harsh segregation, which "yields the African American" "no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world". The passage goes on to proclaim Dunbar's desire to "derive from this double self one that transcends such strife, a better truer self according to which he would neither Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa", nor "bleach his Negro soul in the flood of Americanism for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world" i.e. a message of "spiritual sense and softening influence that black people could bring to a cold and calculation world where
No smile of a child blossoms…
No tender word for there are no lips, only
Artificial hearts
Paid for in hard cash.
Dunbar's "The Paradox" evokes a sense of loss of identity i.e. the loss of the "self". This takes us to the idea of "solipsism" i.e. the search for the self that can only be found in death where
Then shalt thou see me and know me-
Death, then, no longer, but life.
Dunbar's poetry is imbued with an innate sense of pessimism: he believes that the key to truth lies not in life which is
A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in
A minute to smile and an hour to weep in
A pint of joy to a peck of trouble
And never a laugh but the moans come double
And that is life!
But in death which paves the way to another life, to another fresh beginning where man is forever free:
Beyond the years the answer lies
Beyond the years the soul shall find
That endless peace
For which it pined,
For light appears
Dunbar's sympathy is a very emotional poem that visualizes the image of a "caged Bird" who "beats his wings on the cruel bars" of his prison yearning to fly again into the promised land of freedom when
When the sun is bright on the upland slops
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass
And the river flows like a stream of glass
When the first bird sings and the first bud opens…
Dunbar in his "sympathy" voices thee suffering and torture of all the blacks who were imprisoned within the ghetto of the white world, within that golden frame of the so-called blessed dream of freedom. Thus, Dunbar's "caged bird" is that black man who tries to win his way back to freedom…but who finds himself entangled within a mire of despair with his wings wounded and broken as he tries to fly the golden cage:
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
Dunbar's caged bird sings "not a carol of joy and glee…but a prayer…a plea he sends from his heart's deep core" that someday someway he will spread his wings high in the sky and fly…fly again into the heart of freedom; but "alas", all his dreams were crushed against the "cruel bars" that rendered him utterly helpless and fragile just like…"the caged bird".
The poem is read as a "cry against slavery", a cry of the human soul, heart and mind to break loose from the rotten and chaotic atmosphere that smothered the free bird within every single human being:
"Sympathy" is a heartfelt cry of the poet who finds
himself imprisoned amid traditions and prejudices
he feels powerless to destroy.
In his poem, Dunbar marks an essential shift from the "imitation of the European models and toward a strong poetic voice of his own. Yet he displays his keen awareness of the limitations imposed on his culture. Dunbar's wife explained in the A.M.E Review in 1914 that
The iron grating of the book stacks in the Library of Congress suggested to him the bars of the bird's cage. June and July days are hot. All out of doors called and the trees of the shaded streets of Washington were tantalizingly suggestive of his beloved streams and fields. The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one. The dry dust of the dry books…rasped sharply in his hot throat, and he understood how the bird felt when it beats its wings against its cage.