In James Weldon Johnson’s “O Black and Unknown Bards,” the speaker celebrates the spirit of the black slave whose songs dramatize a strong soul striving to unite with God despite worldly oppression.
First Stanza: “O black and unknown bards of long ago”
The speaker begins by asking the question, how did black slaves have the capacity to create such beautiful, soulful songs that have demonstrated through the years that those “unknown bards” came “to know / The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre”?
He asks questions that can never be fully answered, but by asking them, he honors and celebrates those brave souls who created those uplifting hymns. He asks, “Who first from midst the bonds lifted his eye?” He understands that the burden of living as slaves without the ability to strive for personal gain in the material world would cause most individuals to continue to look down and pity their lot or become angry and full of hatred.
But the songs this speaker cherishes reveal souls that looked to God and the spirit for sustenance—not blaming fellow human beings for their lot, but drawing closer to their own soul and their Maker through the music they created. The speaker asks, “Who first from out the still watch, lone and long, / Feeling the ancient faith of prophets rise / Within his dark-kept soul, burst into song?”
Second Stanza: “Heart of what slave poured out such melody”
In his second stanza, the speaker alludes to four well-known Negro Spirituals, “Steal Away to Jesus,” “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” as he again queries “what slave poured out such melody?” He then surmises that whoever that slave was, “His spirit must have rightly floated free.” The ability to gain such freedom while he still “felt his chains” astonishes the speaker, convincing him of the creative imaginations that led to strong faith.
Again, he alludes to a famous spiritual, “Nobody knows de trouble I see,” by asserting that whoever composed this song “breathed that comforting, melodic sigh.” The speaker celebrates the positive, deeply uplifting nature of these widely-known hymns.
Third Stanza: “What merely living clod, what captive thing”
The speaker reveals through his next question the degraded lot of those slave/songsters when he asks, “What merely living clod, what captive thing, / Could toward God through all it darkness grope . . . ?” The question implies that slaves were similar to lumps of barely living clay, and they functioned as mere property of other men.
Because of these unhealthy characteristics, the speaker wonders how such a low-stationed individual could achieve such majestic warbling that rises to God. Assuming that slaves suffered with “deadened heart[s],” the speaker also wonders how they managed to create music “heard not with the ears.” How could a people so uncommonly degraded “sound the elusive reed so seldom blown”—a majestic sound that “stirs the soul or melts the heart”?
Fourth Stanza: “Not that great German master in his dream”
The speaker asserts that not even the great German composer, probably Mozart, mused to produce a song “Nobler than ‘Go down, Moses’.” For example, he notes, “its bars / Now like a mighty trumpet call they stir / The blood.” He likens those strains to songs that men going to war have sung as they are “going to valorous deeds.” He claims that the music as heard in these spirituals “helped make history.”
Fifth Stanza: “There is a wide, wide wonder in it all”
The speaker again emphasizes the curious fact that those so “degraded” with “servile toil” could muster such a “fiery spirit,” that “these simple children,” these “black slave singers, gone, forgot, unfamed” were able to “stretch[ ] out upward, seeking the divine.”
Instead of allowing their souls to become dissolute in seeking only physical relief and comfort, these mighty forbearers set their sights Godward and achieved a type of immortality that even the more well-known composers will never know.
Sixth Stanza: “You sang not deeds of heroes or of kings”
The speaker then reports that these slave singers did not sing of “deeds of heroes or of kings.” They did not sing to glorify war, and they offered “not exulting pean.” Instead, they “touched in chord with music empyrean.” Moreover, they were not aware that they “sang far better they [they] knew.”
These singers produced music that still lives on, but more important than the individual songs themselves, they “sang a race from wood and stone to Christ.” They lifted their fellows and generations to come from mere physical existence to the comforting reality of spirit.
Source
- James Weldon Johnson, “O Black and Unknown Bards,” Bartleby.com.
Linda Sue Grimes - As a writer, researcher, and SRF devotee, Linda Sue Grimes has studied poetry and practiced Kriya Yoga for over thirty years..
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