To the Negro Farmers of the United States

Alice Dunbar-Nelson 1875 (New Orleans, Louisiana) – 1935 ( Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)



God washes clean the souls and hearts of you,
His favored ones, whose backs bend o’er the soil,
Which grudging gives to them requite for toil
In sober graces and in vision true.
God places in your hands the pow’r to do
A service sweet. Your gift supreme to foil
The bare-fanged wolves of hunger in the moil
Of Life’s activities. Yet all too few
Your glorious band, clean sprung from Nature’s heart;
The hope of hungry thousands, in whose breast
Dwells fear that you should fail. God placed no dart
Of war within your hands, but pow’r to start
Tears, praise, love, joy, enwoven in a crest
To crown you glorious, brave ones of the soil.
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Submitted by naama on July 15, 2020

Modified on April 10, 2023

35 sec read
202

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABBAABBACDCCDB
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 631
Words 117
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 14

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar Nelson (July 19, 1875 – September 18, 1935) was an American poet, journalist, and political activist. Among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War, she was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the artistic flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. Her first husband was the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; she then married physician Henry A. Callis; and, lastly, was married to Robert J. Nelson, a poet and civil rights activist. She achieved prominence as a poet, author of short stories and dramas, newspaper columnist, and editor of two anthologies.  more…

All Alice Dunbar-Nelson poems | Alice Dunbar-Nelson Books

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