17 Poems by Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance
By Nava Atlas | On January 7, 2025 | Updated January 17, 2025 | Comments (11)
Helene Johnson (1906 – 1995) was an American poet associated with the Harlem Renaissance. This selection of poems by Helene Johnson features those from the 1920s, the period in which she was most active as a young poet.
She was just nineteen when her first published poem, “Trees at Night,” appeared in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life in 1925. A year later, this journal published six more of her poems.
Her poems also made an appearance in NAACP’s The Crisis and the first and only issue of Fire!!, Langston Hughes’ short-lived publication. As Helene grew aware of the economic and divide facing Black New Yorkers, she began to explore racial themes in her poetry.
Several scholars have made a case for a reconsideration of Helene’s poetry. Though she was a very private and self-described shy person, her poems are bold and innovative, bearing a unique voice.
In Notable Black American Women (1992) T. J. Bryan wrote:
“Helene Johnson’s works are models for aspiring poets — especially for African American women poets who have long been led to believe that no tradition of achievement exists among Black American women in this genre prior to the 1960s … Helene Johnson is a transitional poet whose works of the 1920s and 1930s signal a striking out in new directions among Black American women poets, who began to abandon romantic themes and poetic conventions at this juncture.”
From Lehigh University’s Digital Anthology of African American Poetry:
“Throughout the late 1920s, Johnson explored racial themes in a variety of ways in her poetry, including a number of ‘Harlem’-themed poems (“Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” and “Bottled” being two representative examples). A number of her poems also used natural settings to powerful effect, including “A Southern Road.” Johnson’s poems often dramatize the tension between conservative morality and Christian restraints against the sensuous riot of the emerging African American youth culture of the 1920s (“Magalu”).
Following are the poems presented in this post. They’re from several sources that are all in the public domain, notably Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, edited by Countee Cullen (1927); Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. The Urban League; various issues);
- Trees at Night
- Ah My Race
- Night
- Metamorphism
- Fulfillment
- The Road
- Magalu
- The Little Love
- Futility
- Love in Midsummer
- A Southern Road
- Bottled
- Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem
- Poem
- What Do I Care for Morning?
- Summer Matures
- I Am Not Proud
Helene Johnson’s legacy is encapsulated in this analysis of her life’s work University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy:
“Regardless of her fading presence in the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson’s work is being rediscovered and revived by several scholars today. Verner Mitchell, Nina Miller, and Maureen Honey have acknowledged Johnson’s inventiveness and said that poetry of this ability from of woman of Johnson’s time was unique.
Because she experienced much independence and sovereignty as a child and young adult, Johnson conveys in her poems an extremely powerful female perspective and image. Johnson is described as having been painfully shy while growing up. Her discretion is not displayed in her poetry, however, in which she speaks boldly about her race and her gender. Her 1925 poem, ‘My Race’ challenges the feminine themes of love and motherhood through bold and aggressive stances. Johnson, when writing about race, is brave and empowering.”
. . . . . . . . . .
Trees at Night
Slim sentinels
Stretching lacy arms
About a slumberous moon;
Black quivering
Silhouettes;
Tremulous,
Stenciled on the petal
Of a bluebell;
Ink splattered
On a robin’s breast:
The jagged rent
Of mountains
Reflected in a
Still sleeping lake;
Fragile pinnacles
Of fairy castles;
Torn webs of shadows;
And
Printed ‘gainst the sky—
The trembling beauty
Of an urgent pine.
(Opportunity, May 1925)
. . . . . . . . . . .
Ah My Race
Ah my race,
Hungry race,
Throbbing and young —
Ah, my race,
Wonder race,
Sobbing with song,
Ah, my race,
Careless in mirth
Ah, my veiled race,
Fumbling in birth.
(Opportunity, July 1925)
. . . . . . . . . . .
Night
The moon flung down the bower of her hair,
A sacred cloister while she knelt at prayer.
She crossed pale bosom, breathed a sad amen —
Then bound her hair about her head again.
(Opportunity, January 1926)
. . . . . . . . . . .
Metamorphism
Is this the sea?
This calm emotionless bosom,
Serene as the heart of a converted Magdalene ––
Or this?
This lisping, lulling murmur of soft waters
Kissing a white beached shore with tremulous lips;
Blue rivulets of sky gurgling deliciously
O’er pale smooth-stones ––
This too?
This sudden birth of unrestrained splendour,
Tugging with turbulent force at Neptune’s leash;
This passionate abandon,
This strange tempestuous soliloquy of Nature,
All these –– the sea?
Fulfillment
To climb a hill that hungers for the sky,
To dig my hands wrist deep in pregnant earth,
To watch a young bird, veering, learn to fly,
To give a still, stark poem shining birth.
. . . . . . . . . .
The Road
Ah, little road all whirry in the breeze,
A leaping clay hill lost among the trees,
The bleeding note of rapture streaming thrush
Caught in a drowsy hush
And stretched out in a single singing line of dusky song.
Ah little road, brown as my race is brown,
Your trodden beauty like our trodden pride,
Dust of the dust, they must not bruise you down.
Rise to one brimming golden, spilling cry!
(Opportunity, July 1926)
. . . . . . . . . .
Magalu
Summer comes. The ziczac hovers
‘Round the greedy-mouthed crocodile.
A vulture beats away a foolish jackal.
The flamingo is a dash of pink
Against dark green mangroves,
Her slender legs rivaling her slim neck.
The laughing lake gurgles, delicious music in its throat
And lulls to sleep the lazy lizard,
A nebulous being on a sun-scorched rock.
In such a place,
In this pulsing, riotous gasp of color,
I met Magalu, dark as a tree at night,
Eager-lipped, listening to a man with a white collar
And a small black book with a cross on it.
Oh, Magalu, come! Take my hand and I will read you poetry,
Chromatic words,
Seraphic symphonies,
Fill up your throat with laughter and your heart with song.
Do not let him lure you from your laughing waters,
Lulling lakes, lissome winds.
Would you sell the colors of your sunset and the fragrance
Of your flowers, and the passionate wonder of your forest
For a creed that will not let you dance?
(Opportunity, July 1926)
. . . . . . . . . .
The Little Love
A shy ear bared
For incipient kisses;
A secret shared
In laughter exquisite;
Soft finger tips,
While the night embraces,
Touch passionate colors
That morning erases
And when the Dawn wakens,
No attempt to recapture
Those swift fleeting hours of ecstatic rapture,
But hide the shy ear with a curl, my pet,
And that little secret,— forget.
(The Messenger, July 1926)
. . . . . . . . . .
Futility
It is silly —
This waiting for love
In a parlor.
When love is singing up and down the alley
Without a collar.
(Opportunity, August 1926)
. . . . . . . . . .
Love in Midsummer
Ah love
Is like a throbbing wind,
A lullaby all crooning,
Ah love
Is like a summer sea’s soft breast.
Ah love’s
A sobbing violin
That naïve night is tuning,
Ah love
Is down from off the white moon’s nest.
(The Messenger, October 1926)
. . . . . . . . . .
A Southern Road
Yolk-colored tongue
Parched beneath a burning sky,
A lazy little tune
Hummed up the crest of some
Soft sloping hill.
One streaming line of beauty
Flowering by a forest
Pregnant with tears.
A hidden nest for beauty
Idly flung my God
In one lonely lingering hour
Before the Sabbath.
A blue-fruited black gum,
Like a tall predella,
Bears a dangling figure,—
Sacrificial dower to the raff, Swinging alone,
A solemn, tortured shadow in the air.
(Fire!!, November 1926)
. . . . . . . . . .
Bottled
Upstairs on the third floor
Of the 135th Street library
In Harlem, I saw a little
Bottle of sand, brown sand
Just like the kids make pies
Out of down at the beach.
But the label said: “This
Sand was taken from the Sahara desert. ”
Imagine that! The Sahara desert!
Some bozo’s been all the way to Africa to get some sand.
And yesterday on Seventh Avenue
I saw a darky dressed fit to kill
In yellow gloves and swallow tail coat
And swirling a cane. And everyone
Was laughing at him. Me too,
At first, till I saw his face
When he stopped to hear a
Organ grinder grind out some jazz.
Boy! You should a seen that darky’s face!
It just shone. Gee, he was happy!
And he began to dance. No
Charleston or Black Bottom for him.
No sir. He danced just as dignified
And slow. No, not slow either.
Dignified and proud! You couldn’t
Call it slow, not with all the
Cuttin’ up he did. You would a died to see him.
The crowd kept yellin’ but he didn’t hear,
Just kept on dancin’ and twirlin’ that cane
And yellin’ out loud every once in a while.
I know the crowd thought he was coo-coo.
But say, I was where I could see his face,
And somehow, I could see him dancin’ in a jungle,
A real honest-to-cripe jungle, and he wouldn’t have on them
Trick clothes — those yaller shoes and yaller gloves
And swallow-tail coat. He wouldn’t have on nothing.
And he wouldn’t be carrying no cane.
He’d be carrying a spear with a sharp fine point
Like the bayonets we had “over there.”
And the end of it would be dipped in some kind of
Hoo-doo poison. And he’d be dancin’ black and naked and gleaming.
And he’d have rings in his ears and on his nose
And bracelets and necklaces of elephants’ teeth.
Gee, I bet he’d be beautiful then all right.
No one would laugh at him then, I bet.
Say! That man that took that sand from the Sahara desert
And put it in a little bottle on a shelf in the library,
That’s what they done to this shine, ain’t it? Bottled him.
Trick shoes, trick coat, trick cane, trick everything — all glass —
But inside —
Gee, that poor shine!
(Vanity Fair, May 1927, and Caroling Dusk, both 1927)
“Bottled” needs an introduction and context, without which it can be misconstrued. It was first published in 1927 in the May issue of Vanity Fair. and later the same year in the classic anthology Caroling Dusk
Katherine R. Lynes in Project Muse offers much insight into the story behind the poem:
“In ‘Bottled,’ Johnson puts authentic and inauthentic into dialogue when she puts an imagined African jungle into a poem set on the real streets of New York City. The speaker of the poem admires the (imagined) cultural adornments and proud dancing of a man in the streets of Harlem.
The speaker reports that he dances to jazz, American music that has some of its roots in Africa but is not in and of itself wholly African; she also imagines this man as he would be if he were in Africa. He functions as a cultural object in the poem, a cultural object with contested authenticities. Johnson’s use of a mixture of cultural tropes reveals her awareness of and attentiveness to theories of cultural relativism.”
Read the rest of this analysis at Project Muse.
. . . . . . . . . .
Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem
You are disdainful and magnificent—
Your perfect body and your pompous gait,
Your dark eyes flashing solemnly with hate,
Small wonder that you are incompetent
To imitate those whom you so despise—
Your shoulders towering high above the throng,
Your head thrown back in rich, barbaric song,
Palm trees and mangoes stretched before your eyes.
Let others toil and sweat for labor’s sake
And wring from grasping hands their need of gold.
Why urge ahead your supercilious feet?
Scorn will efface each footprint that you make.
I love your laughter arrogant and bold.
You are too splendid for this city street.
(Caroling Dusk, 1927)
. . . . . . . . . .
See also …
Renaissance Women: 13 Female Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance to Rediscover and Read
. . . . . . . . . . .
Poem
Little brown boy,
Slim, dark, big-eyed,
Crooning love songs to your banjo
Down at the Lafayerre —
Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
High sort of and a bit to one side,
Like a prince, a jazz prince. And I love
Your eyes flashing, and your hands,
And your patent-leathered feet,
And your shoulders jerking the jig-wa.
And I love your teeth flashing,
And the way your hair shines in the spotlight
Like it was the real stuff.
Gee, brown boy, I loves you all over.
I’m glad I’m a jig. I’m glad I can
Understand your dancin’ and your
Singin’, and feel all the happiness
And joy and don’t care in you.
Gee, boy, when you sing, I can close my ears
And hear tom-toms just as plain.
Listen to me, will you, what do I know
About tom-toms? But I like the word, sort of,
Don’t you? It belongs to us.
Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
And the way you sing, and dance,
And everything.
Say, I think you’re wonderful. You’re
Allright with me,
You are.
(Caroling Dusk, 1927)
. . . . . . . . . .
What Do I Care for Morning
What do I care for morning,
For a shivering aspen tree,
For sun flowers and sumac
Opening greedily?
What do I care for morning,
For the glare of the rising sun,
For a sparrow’s noisy prating,
For another day begun?
Give me the beauty of evening,
The cool consummation of night,
And the moon like a love-sick lady,
Listless and wan and white.
Give me a little valley
Huddled beside a hill,
Like a monk in a monastery,
Safe and contented and still,
Give me the white road glistening,
A strand of the pale moon’s hair,
And the tall hemlocks towering
Dark as the moon is fair.
Oh what do I care for morning,
Naked and newly born—
Night is here, yielding and tender—
What do I care for dawn!
(Caroling Dusk, 1927)
. . . . . . . . . .
Summer Matures
Summer matures. Brilliant Scorpion
Appears. The Pelican’s thick pouch
Hangs heavily with perch and slugs.
The brilliant-bellied newt flashes
Its crimson crest in the white water.
In the lush meadow, by the river,
The yellow-freckled toad laughs
With a toothless gurgle at the white-necked stork
Standing asleep, and one red reedy leg.
And here Pan dreams of slim stalks clean for piping,
And of a naked nightingale gone mad with freedom.
Come. I shall weave a bed of reeds
And willow limbs and pale nightflowers.
I shall strip the roses of their petals,
And the white down from the swan’s neck.
Come, night is here. The air is drunk
With wild grape and sweet clover.
And by the secret fount of Aganippe
Euterpe sings of love. Ah, the woodland creatures,
The doves in pairs, the wild sow and her shoats,
The stag searching the forest for a mate,
Know more of love than you, my callous Phaon.
The young moon is a curved white scimitar
Pierced through the swooning night.
Sweet Phaon. With Sappho sleep like the stars at dawn.
This night was born for love my Phaon.
Come.
(Opportunity, July 1927; also Caroling Dusk, 1927)
. . . . . . . . . .
I Am Not Proud
I am not proud that I am bold
Or proud that I am black.
Color was given to me as a gage
And boldness came with that.
(The Saturday Evening Quill, April 1929)
Further reading
“The Published Poems of Helene Johnson” by T.J. Bryan. (The Langston Hughes Review, Fall 1987, Volume 6, No. 2, pp. 11-21. Published by: Langston Hughes Society, Penn State University Press)
“Toward an Understanding of Helene Johnson’s Hybrid Modernist Poetics” by Robert Fillman. CLA Journal, Vol. 61, No. 1-2 (Sept. – Dec. 2017), pp. 45-64
Indeed, thank you for this critical waterhole.
Thanks, April; she was a wonderful poet!
Thanks for your preserving and sharing this work.
I read that Helene Johnson, though born in Boston, grew up in Brookline. Any information about any specific address? or school?
Harriet, I think her poetry is wonderful, and thank you for your comment. I have no information on her specific whereabouts in the Brookline area, though this aspect of her origins is mentioned in the biography of her life and work on this site: https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-biography/helene-johnson/ Sorry I can’t be of more help!
Thank you for this wonderful information about these little known female poets and their poems. Where might I find publication dates for the individual poems?
Thank you for your kind comment, Deborah. That’s our mission! I don’t have more specific info on dates for the poems, but it’s widely accepted that most of Helene’s poems were written in the mid- to late-1920s. Her last poem was published in the mid-1930s.
Hello David,
This is Abigail MGrath, Helene’s daughter. Allow me to thank you for your generosity in getting my mother’s works out to the public.
Something odd has happened and I wonder if you can help me.
I have just been gifted with a box full of my mother’s handwritten poems. Do you have any ideas on how I can go about archiving them?
Yours in good faith,
Abigail
Hello Abigail, it’s so good to hear from you — we’d been in touch about the retreat you were offering to mothers with children a couple of years ago. David is a commenter, so you’re talking to Nava here — the owner of this website.
What an amazing gift to have your mother’s poems, hand written! The first thing I would do would be to make a couple of copies of each of them for safekeeping. Then perhaps you can donate them to an institution that would appreciate them. The first thing that comes to mind is the Schomberg branch of the NY Public library in Harlem, which has a collections of papers of notable African Americans. Other collections that have strong focus on African American history and literature are the Beineke Library at Yale, and the Rubenstein Library at Duke.
If you’d like to take this conversation offline, please contact me via this site’s contact form. I do want to ask, just out of curiosity, are the poems dated? And are there some that have never been published before?
Hi Abigail I might be able to help you. My mother is a cataloguer at William & Mary College. She may be able to get that done for you!
This literary body of Poetry is so fulfilling to my Soul. Although not born during that time as a Black born in America. I can feel the pain, joy, and wondering nature of their poetic verses.
Thank you
Thank you, David. I went on your foundation’s website, it looks fascinating; and thank you for all that you do. Literary Ladies is committed to elevating the voices of classic women authors, including Black and Latina writers of the past. You may be interested to know that Abigail McGrath, Helene Johnson’s daughter, runs a writer’s retreat in Oak Bluffs (Martha’s Vineyard), MA. She asked me to post about a grant they were giving last year: https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/literary-travel/renaissance-house-a-retreat-for-writers-and-artists/ — it was thrilling to be in touch with her, like touching history. We both agreed that her mother’s work is not as well known today as it should be.