Upon graduating from Virginia Seminary, Anne Spencer made Lynchburg, Virginia, her permanent home. She cultivated there a renowned, lushly cultivated garden (memorialized by Sterling A. Brown in his poem “To a Certain Lady”), which also served as the most alluring feature of a warm, open house that functioned as an unofficial home away from home and conference center for many other black poets of the era.
Although the self-effacingly generous Spencer would not publish a volume of poetry during her lifetime, her presence as a significant poet of the period is evidenced in anthologies both past and present, as well as in respected literary journals of the 1920s, such as Opportunity and Crisis. Spencer’s most rigorous poems engage the reader through piercing images and chiseled, precise language. Internal and meditative, these poems encompass personal and existential, rather than social concerns; race is rarely her explicit subject.
Born in 1882 in Bramwell, West Virginia, Spencer worked for many years as the librarian of Dunbar High School in Lynchburg, before her death in 1975.
It is dangerous for a woman to defy the gods;
To taunt them with the tongue’s thin tip,
Or strut in the weakness of mere humanity,
Or draw a line daring them to cross;
The gods own the searing lightning,
The drowning waters, tormenting fears,
And anger of red sins.
Oh, but worse still if you mince timidly—
Dodge this way or that, or kneel or pray,
Be kind, or sweat agony drops
Or lay your quick body over your feeble young;
If you have beauty or plainness, if celibate
Or vowed—the gods are Juggernaut,
Passing over … over …
This you may do:
Lock your heart, then, quietly,
And lest they peer within,
Light no lamp when dark comes down
Raise no shade for sun;
Breathless must your breath come through
If you’d die and dare deny
The gods their god-like fun.
Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth, and sea.
Black men are most men; but the white are free!
White things are rare things; so rare, so rare
They stole from out a silvered world—somewhere.
Finding earth-plains fair plains, save greenly grassed,
They strewed white feathers of cowardice, as they passed;
The golden stars with lances fine
The hills all red and darkened pine,
They blanced with their wand of power;
And turned the blood in a ruby rose
To a poor white poppy-flower.
(A Lover Muses)
Flame-flower, Day-torch, Mauna Loa,
I saw a daring bee, today, pause and soar,
Into your flaming heart;
Then did I hear crisp, crinkled laughter
As the furies after tore him apart?
A bird, next, small and humming,
Looked into your startled depths and fled …
Surely, some dread sight, and dafter
Than human eyes as mine can see,
Set the stricken air waves drumming
In his flight.
Day-torch, Flame-flower, cool-hot Beauty,
I cannot see, I cannot hear your flutey
Voice lure your loving swain,
But I know one other to whom you are in beauty
Born in vain:
Hair like the setting sun,
Her eyes a rising star,
Motions gracious as reeds by Babylon, bar
All your competing;
Hands like, how like, brown lilies sweet,
Cloth of gold were fair enough to touch her feet …
Ah, how the sense floods at my repeating,
As once in her fire-lit heart I felt the furies
Beating, beating.
Ah, how poets sing and die!
Make one song and Heaven takes it;
Have one heart and Beauty breaks it;
Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I—
Ah, how poets sing and die!
Ah, you are cruel;
You ask too much;
Offered a hand, a finger-tip,
You must have a soul to clutch.