Substitution
Is Life itself but many ways of thought,
Does thinking furl the poets’ pleiades,
Is in His slightest convolution wrought
These mantled worlds and their men-freighted seas?
He thinks—and being comes to ardent things:
The splendor of the day-spent sun, love’s birth,—
Or dreams a little, while creation swings
The circle of His mind and Time’s full girth . . .
As here within this noisy peopled room
My thought leans forward . . . quick! you’re lifted clear
Of brick and frame to moonlit garden bloom,—
Absurdly easy, now, our walking, dear,
Talking, my leaning close to touch your face . . .
His All-Mind bids us keep this sacred place!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 4, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Substitution” first appeared in Countee Cullen’s anthology Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927). In Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2011), poet Evie Shockley calls the poem “an ars poetica on the possibilities of creating a world via imagination, the poet’s imagination, in particular. [. . .] [I]t claims for the poet a power that both enlarges the sonnet and exceeds it.” She continues, “A bit in advance of some of the theoretical movements along similar lines that are so familiar to intellectuals today, the speaker of Spencer’s poem considers seriously that the ‘worlds’ we experience may be just as much the creation of our ‘thinking’ as God’s ‘thought.’ [. . .] [I]nterestingly, the poet’s creative powers precede God’s in this meditation—as though, in first recognizing that ‘poets’’ minds drew the constellations in the sky, the speaker is then able to understand divine creation as the product of a tiny whorl of God’s brain, or ‘All-Mind.’”
Anne Spencer
Anne Spencer was born Anne Bethel Scales Bannister on February 6, 1882, on a plantation in Henry County, Virginia, to former slaves, Joel Cephus Bannister and Sarah Louise Scales, the daughter of a slaveholder. Spencer’s parents separated in the late 1880s. Her mother supported the family by working as an itinerant cook. Financial hardship led to Spencer being temporarily placed with a foster family in Bramwell, West Virginia, though she was still cared for by her mother, who was determined to raise Spencer as member of the black bourgeoisie.