“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.”