Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

My Easter Dove

1849 –

1916

There came a dove, an Easter dove,
When morning stars grew dim;
It fluttered round my lattice bars,
To chant a matin hymn.

It brought a lily in its beak,
Aglow with dewy sheen;
I caught the strain, the incense breathed,
And uttered praise between.

It brought a shrine of holy thoughts
To calm my soul that day;
I caught the meaning of the note,
Why did it fly away?

Come peaceful dove, sweet Easter dove!
Above earth’s storm and strife,
Sing of the joy of Easter-tide,
Of light and hope and life.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 31, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

In 1876, Ray’s poem “Lincoln” was read at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C. Ray died in 1917.

About Henrietta Cordelia Ray

Occasion

Themes

About this Poem

“My Easter Dove” appears in H. Cordelia Ray’s second and last poetry collection Poems (Grafton Press, 1910). In Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Heidi Morse, a lecturer in nineteenth-century African American literary and cultural studies, writes, “Ray’s poems, like the many other verses written by northern black women (such as the poets named by [Gertrude Bustill] Mossell) and published in periodicals such as The Woman’s Era and A.M.E. Church Review, are authentic reflections of her social and cultural milieu. As late as 1926, the African American educator and activist Maritcha R. Lyons praised Ray’s ‘versatility, love of nature, classical knowledge, delicate fancy, an[d] unaffected piety. She sings like a gladsome child basking in the sunshine of earth’s cheer and beauty; again, like a serious maiden she stands with quiet reverent feet at the edge of sealed mysteries.’” Morse then notes, “Ray’s obscurity within the African American literary tradition is not merely incidental; rather, I submit that scholarship on Ray has been hindered due to an artificial critical division between African American literature and classicism. For example, Angela Sorby characterizes Ray’s classical verses as the work of a ‘postsentimental’ female poet ‘performing her competence by crossing into the public sphere of the classics’ but distancing herself from potential discriminations through the ‘artifice’ of classicism. Such a reading positions Ray’s neoclassicism as a performance—perhaps even a performance of whiteness. But for Lyons and her contemporaries, Ray’s classicism was solidly rooted in her educational background and her black activist community.”

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

More by this poet

The Venus of Milo

O peerless marble marvel! what of grace,
Or matchless symmetry is not enshrined
In thy rare contours! Could we hope to find
The regal dignity of that fair face
In aught less beautiful? We would retrace,
At sight of thee, our willing steps where wind
The paths great Homer trod. Within whose mind

Henrietta Cordelia Ray

1910

July

Sunshine and shadow play amid the trees
In bosky groves, while from the vivid sky
The sun’s gold arrows fleck the fields at noon,
Where weary cattle to their slumber hie.
How sweet the music of the purling rill,
Trickling adown the grassy hill!
While dreamy fancies come to give repose

Henrietta Cordelia Ray

1910

Niobe

O mother-heart! when fast the arrows flew,
   Like blinding lightning, smiting as they fell,
   One after one, one after one, what knell
Could fitly voice thy anguish! Sorrow grew 
To throes intensest, when thy sad soul knew
   Thy youngest, too, must go. Was it not well,
   Avengers wroth, just one to spare? Ay, tell
The ages of soul-struggle sterner? Through
The flinty stone, O image of despair,
   Sad Niobe, thy maddened grief did flow
In bitt’rest tears, when all thy wailing prayer
   Was so denied. Alas!

Henrietta Cordelia Ray

1893

Poems

Page submenu block

My Easter Dove

More by this poet

Newsletter Sign Up