Walker begins her portrait of the people in the neighborhood by making their lives testaments to those of their African ancestors. This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems chronicles Walker's auspicious literary career while proving that she has unrivaled tenacity and endurance as a poet.
Walker has been compared to many great writers and has claimed, as personal acquaintances and influences, the likes of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks.
The poem poignantly describes the joys, heartaches, and triumphs of African Americans in the United States. Written in free verse, the poem chronicles the everyday and often mundane aspects of hard labor and the simple pleasures of a dispossessed people. Yet it also makes blacks complicit in their own misery and calls for a new day, a revolution of the masses. The opening stanzas of Walker's poem ring with a particularly lyrical note. She establishes from the beginning a pattern of overflowing participles unpunctuated with requisite commas, leaving the reader almost breathless.
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.
Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control. Her final call, however, is not a plea for tolerance and forgiveness; rather it is an exhortation for protest. She admits a need for answers and "molten truths" but also enjoins her people to seize the power needed for spiritual, emotional, and political transformation:.
We have been believers believing in our burdens and our demigods too long. Now the needy no longer weep and pray; the long-suffering arise, and our fists bleed against the bars with a strange insistency. While "Dark Blood" chronicles the ancestral homelands of African diasporal peoples, "Sorrow Home" establishes the southern United States as the native residence of African Americans.
A true lyricist, she seeks to capture their dreams, emotions, and very being through her poetry. What translates is a specific, unparalleled beauty and vibrancy: "a mirrored pool of brilliance in the dawn.
Over her lifetime, Walker collected no less than 6 honorary degrees and fellowships as well as a life time achievement award from the state of Mississippi. Her collection This is My Century in included the poem Love Song for Alex which was a celebration of the days she spent with her husband and is typical of her control of language to create vibrant images. In , at the age of 73, Margaret Walker succumbed to breast cancer and died in a Chicago Hospital. Though her canon of work is perhaps a little smaller than other poets of the same era, she has been, and still is, an influence for many Black American and women writers.
Timeline Click on each item to display more information. Timemap Click on each item to display more information. All of these things are crops that white men forced slaves to cultivate and in many cases die for.
Instead of rejecting that connection, the speaker yearns for it. Indeed, she rejects the city that so many of her brethren have fled for when she says "I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats" line 8.
Thus the speaker longs for her natural home in the South even though the situation there is a dangerous one for African Americans. In fact, she acknowledges that danger when she references "the Klan of hate" that forces her to stay out of the South line Walker's biography supports this reading.
She was born and raised in the South until Langston Hughes encouraged her to move North to complete her education. While there, she was both a witness and a participant in the Great Migration that caused much hardship for African Americans. She expresses her longing for her home in this poem.
Indeed, she stated in the interview with Lucy Freibert:. When I wrote this I was in cold Chicago, and I didn't see grass and hay and clover in bloom.
I didn't see red clay.
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