Harlem: The Black City
I.
We live and die, and what we reap
Is merely chaff from life’s storehouse;
For devil’s grain we barter souls
And in his wine our bodies souse;
We build to Pleasure monuments;
But Pleasure always passes by.
The grave! —The grave! our only hope,
The grave where dust grimed failures lie.
II.
We ask for life, men give us wine,
We ask for rest, men give us death;
We long for Pan and Phoebus harp.
But Bacchus blows on us his breath.
O Harlem, weary are thy sons
Of living that they never chose;
Give not to them the lotus leaf,
But Mary’s wreath and England’s rose.
Copyright © 2025 by Fenton Johnson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 22, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Harlem: The Black City” appears in Fenton Johnson’s third and final poetry collection Songs of the Soil (Trachtenberg Co., 1916). In the book’s introduction, Johnson wrote: “In my previous volumes I devoted myself to attempts at versification in the language of the academics and colleges; now I cast aside the English of the Victorians and assume the language of the plantation and levee. The Georgian poets and writers are seeking romance out of their environment. I feel that a true artist can go no further than the American Negro for romantic inspiration. […] Behind the Negro there is a wealth of buried tradition. […] The Confederacy is dead, but Mammy lives on and on, the most glorious tradition in either race. In these poems I have attempted to preserve that spirit.”
Fenton Johnson
Fenton Johnson was born in Chicago in 1888. He is regarded as a forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson was born to Elijah, a railroad porter and one of the wealthiest African American Chicagoans, and Jesse (née Taylor). Johnson enrolled at the University of Chicago and attended both Northwestern University and Columbia University’s School of Journalism.