11 Poems by Angelina Weld Grimké on Love, Longing, & Race
By Skyler Gomez | On October 27, 2020 | Updated July 18, 2022 | Comments (5)
Angelina Weld Grimké (1880 – 1958) was an American playwright, poet, and educator best known as a figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Following is a selection of poems by Angelina Weld Grimké on love, race, nature, and other subjects that preoccupied her.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Grimké was part of a family of biracial civil rights activists, and in earlier generations, abolitionists. Her father served some time as the Vice-President of the NAACP.
Her great-aunts (including the similarly named Angelina Grimké Weld) were well-known abolitionists and advocates for women’s rights in the 19th century. They were significant influences for Grimké’s use of literature as a propagandist tool.
With a mixed-race father and white mother, Grimké was 75% white, but she identified as Black. After her parents separated when she was a child, she was raised by her father in Boston, where she attended school. As a woman of color, she was deeply invested in issues affecting the African-American community.
After completing her studies, she moved to Washington D.C. where she began connecting with fellow poet Georgia Douglas Johnson. Shortly after, she wrote her first articles and poems about racism and the black experience in America. After her father’s death, which devastated her, she moved to New York City where she lived fairly reclusively until her death.
In Afro-American Women Writers (1988), Ann Allen Shockley wrote of Grimké’s poetic work:
As a poet, she became a familiar contributor to magazines and anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance. Sixteen of her poems appeared in Countee Cullen’s classic Caroling Dusk. They were also featured in the pages of The Crisis and Opportunity magazines, although none was collected for publication.
The poems were conventional verses on nature, love, life, and death. She was considered an imagist poet in the mode of the “old lapidaries,” who wrote from her own private emotions about what she felt and saw in a sensitive, poignant, and beautiful way.
Gloria T. Hull, who exhumed Grimké from near literary oblivion, said of her work: “Grimké’s poetry is very delicate, musical, romantic, and pensive. It draws extensively on the natural world for allusions and figures of speech.” Hull found some of her unpublished poetry lesbian in nature.
Of this, she wrote: “Most of these lyrics either chronicle a romance which is now dead or record a cruel and unrequited love.”
Here are the poems included in this listing. Many of them were written in the 1920s, and anthologized in Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923) andThe Poetry of the Negro (1949; edited by Langston Hughes). A small number appeared later, as mentioned above, in Caroling Dusk (1927; edited by Countee Cullen).
- Fragment
- The Black Finger
- At April
- Trees
- A Winter Twilight
- Tenebris
- The Eyes of My Regret
- Death
- Vigil
- Hushed by the Hands of Sleep
- For the Candle-Light
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Fragment
I am the woman with the black black skin
I am the laughing woman with the black black face
I am living in the cellars and in every crowded place
I am toiling just to eat
In the cold and in the heat
And I laugh
I am the laughing woman who’s forgotten how to weep
I am the laughing woman who’s afraid to go to sleep
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The Black Finger
I have just seen a beautiful thing
Slim and still,
Against a gold, gold sky,
A straight cypress,
Sensitive
Exquisite,
A black finger
Pointing upwards.
Why, beautiful, still finger are you black?
And why are you pointing upwards?
Analysis of “The Black Finger”
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At April
Toss your gay heads,
Brown girl trees;
Toss your gay lovely heads;
Shake your brown slim bodies;
Stretch your brown slim arms;
Stretch your brown slim toes.
Who knows better than we,
With the dark, dark bodies,
What it means
When April comes a-laughing and a-weeping
Once again
At our hearts?
. . . . . . . . . .
Trees
God made them very beautiful, the trees:
He spoke and gnarled of bole or silken sleek
They grew; majestic bowed or very meek;
Huge-bodied, slim; sedate and full of glees.
And He had pleasure deep in all of these.
And to them soft and little tongues to speak
Of Him to us, He gave wherefore they seek
From dawn to dawn to bring unto our knees.
Yet here amid the wistful sounds of leaves,
A black-hued gruesome something swings and swings;
Laughter it knew and joy in little things
Till man’s hate ended all. -And so man weaves.
And God, how slow, how very slow weaves He-
Was Christ Himself not nailed to a tree?
. . . . . . . . . .
A Winter Twilight
A silence slipping around like death,
Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh,
a breath; One group of trees, lean,
naked and cold,
Inking their cress ‘gainst a
sky green-gold;
One path that knows where the
corn flowers were;
Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,
One star that I loved ere the
fields went brown.
. . . . . . . . . .
Tenebris
There is a tree, by day,
That, at night, Has a shadow,
A hand huge and black,
With fingers long and black.
All through the dark,
Against the white man’s house,
In the little wind,
The black hand plucks and plucks
At the bricks.
The bricks are the color of blood
and very small.
Is it a black hand,
Or is it a shadow?
(1927; analysis of “Tenebris”)
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Books on women writers of the Harlem Renaissance on Bookshop.org*
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The Eyes Of My Regret
Always at dusk, the same tearless experience,
The same dragging of feet up the same well-worn path
To the same well-worn rock;
The same crimson or gold dropping away of the sun
The same tints, – rose, saffron, violet, lavender, grey
Meeting, mingling, mixing mistily;
Before me the same blue black cedar rising jaggedly to
a point;
Over it, the same slow unlidding of twin stars,
Two eyes, unfathomable, soul-searing,
Watching, watching, watching me;
The same two eyes that draw me forth, against my will
dusk after dusk;
The same two eyes that keep me sitting late into the
night, chin on knees
Keep me there lonely, rigid, tearless, numbly
miserable –
The eyes of my Regret.
Analysis of “The Eyes of My Regret”
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Death
When the lights blur out for thee and me,
And the black comes in with a sweep,
I wonder — will it mean life again,
Or sleep?
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Vigil
You will come back, sometime, somehow;
But if it will be bright or black
I cannot tell; I only know
You will come back.
Does not the spring with fragrant pack
Return unto the orchard bough?
Do not the birds retrace their track?
All things return. Some day the glow
Of quick’ning dreams will pierce your lack;
And when you know I wait as now
You will come back.
. . . . . . . . . .
Hushed by the Hands Of Sleep
Hushed by the hands of Sleep,
By the beautiful hands of Sleep.
Very gentle and quiet he lies,
With a little smile of sweet surprise,
Just softly hushed at lips and eyes,
Hushed by the hands of Sleep,
By the beautiful hands of Sleep.
Hushed by the hands of Sleep,
By the beautiful hands of Sleep.
Death leaned down as his eyes grew dim,
But oh! it was beautiful to him.
Hushed by the hands of Sleep,
By the beautiful hands of Sleep.
. . . . . . . . . .
For the Candle-Light
The sky was blue, so blue that day
And each daisy white, so white,
O, I knew that no more could rains fall grey
And night again be night . . . . .
I knew, I knew. Well, if night is night,
And the grey skies greyly cry.
I have in a book for the candle light,
A daisy dead and dry.
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Learn more about Angelina Weld Grimké
See more of her poetic work at Academy of American Poets
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Skyler Isabella Gomez is a 2019 SUNY New Paltz graduate with a degree in Public Relations and a minor in Black Studies. Her passions include connecting more with her Latin roots by researching and writing about legendary Latina authors.
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Brilliant poems! She was a genuine genius! Rest in peace, magnificent poet and playwright Ms. Angelina Weld Grimke!
Lovely article. I am a poet. I have got so many information about the poet Angelina Weld Grimké from your article. I have an website on literature in Bengali Language. I want to write about her and translate the poem in Bengali Language. Kindly tell me whether there will be any copyright problem or I can go ahead easily.
Thank you, Dipak. I believe that Angelina’s poems are all in the public domain so there should be no problem!
I was wondering – do you have any resources/information on the copyrights surrounding Angelina Weld Grimke’s work? I am a composer and I am hoping to set Trees, The Black Finger, and Tenebris to music. I have been (so far unsuccessfully) scouring the Internet for the dates of publication of these particular poems to see if they are public domain, and if they are not, for contact information for the copyright holder of these works so that I can reach out through the appropriate avenues to make an arrangement. Please feel free to reply or contact me directly if you think you might be able to help – thanks!!
Omar, what a beautiful idea. It also gave me the idea that I should put dates on the poems when I can find them, and links to analyses, as there’s much to say about her poetry. As far as I could tell The Black Finger is dated 1923, which means that it’s in the public domain; Tenebris is 1927 which means it’s almost in the public domain; and I couldn’t verify Trees. All these poems are all over the internet, which pretty much points to the idea that there’s no rights holder. AWG had no children, and so probably no heirs, and most of her significant poetry was produced in the 1920s. If it were me, I’d feel safe about setting her poems to music, but you need to do what’s best for your comfort zone. Meanwhile, thanks for reaching out, and I’ll be working on updating this post very soon!