The Black Christ, & other poems

Description

Encovragements, for such as shall have intention to bee vnder-takers in the new…. is a poetry collection written in the early 20th century, in the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. It interweaves intimate lyric pieces with a major narrative poem, uniting themes of love, doubt, mortality, and Black identity under Jim Crow. The likely topic is a moral and spiritual reckoning with racism and suffering, expressed through art and Christian symbolism. The book ranges from concise meditations on desire, pride, despair, and endurance to a long narrative centerpiece about a Southern Black family confronting racial terror. An elder brother narrates his mother’s unshakable faith and his younger brother’s proud temper; after the younger man defends a white woman’s dignity and strikes a racist aggressor, a mob hunts him down and lynches him. The narrator plunges into blasphemy and grief, until a miracle: the slain brother reappears transfigured as a Christ figure, the lynching tree becomes the Cross, and sorrow turns into renewed faith. Around this passion story, other poems praise and probe love, face death without illusion, honor Black history and kingship, and insist that poetry answer both universal human feeling and the particular claims of race. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Subjects

• African Americans -- Poetry
• PS