Remembrances of Spring: Collected Early Poems.

Reviewed by Pinkie Gordon Lane Baton Rouge, Louisiana 

Naomi Long Madgett has provided for the literary world a collection of her early poems written, for the most part, before she was twenty-one and some, according to her prefatory essay, as early as the age of twelve. Songs to a Phantom Nightingale (1941) and One and the Many (1956) were her first two published volumes, while Phantom Nightingale: Juvenilia, though it was not published until 1981, consists of poems "written before, during, and for two years after the period covered by the first publication." Her "Preface" provides a brief autobiographical context for her developmental years: Her parental background and some literary influences offer a valuable index for literary historians wanting to study the works of this important African American author.

Because Madgett is a lyric poet in the most generic sense of the term, it is difficult at times to distinguish between Madgett the poems' author and Madgett the poems' persona. Even when we are aware that certain poems are not necessarily "autobiographical," as the use of the first person pronoun I can deceive us into believing, her poems cry out as coming from the heart. The poetic "voice" is but a thinly disguised young Madgett expressing anguish, love, and rejection, but also the voice of one who knows the joy of life. We see, too, a poet angered by the plight of the "Negro" of the late 1930s and early 1940s - overtly racist years predating the sit-ins, marches, and Black cultural revolution of the late 1960s.

A surprising dexterity emerges from the pen of this young poet, admittedly schooled on the rhyming metrics and diction of European patterns, but not without the influence of such "Negro" authors as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and James Weldon Johnson. "In spite of the exposure I had to poetry by African Americans," she tells us in the preface, "it was the literature I studied at school which influenced my writing the most. The emphasis on Romantic and Victorian English poets, along with a few Americans such as Longfellow, locked me into unnatural patterns of diction, rhyme, and meter."

Let us remember also that these early poems, composed between the 1938 and 1942, predate the influences we as modernists may have felt coming from such poets as T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets, or the Black Aesthetic and African American revolutionary poets of the late '60s and early '70s.

Though Madgett is somewhat younger in age than Gwendolyn Brooks or Margaret Walker, these poems were written close in time to Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Margaret Walker's For My People (1942). At a time when many of us were still endeavoring to come to terms with the changes in our bodies as we emerged from the turbulent years of adolescence, and at time when as Blacks we lived in an outwardly and openly racist society, Madgett - the product of a nuclear, Christian family (her father was a Baptist minister) - was crafting her poems and getting them published in such outlets as The Challenger, the Quill and Scroll Supplement of the Virginia Statesman, and The Tuskegee Institute Chapel Bulletin. And though her style is couched in the archaic diction and models of a previous century, her consciousness was already being shaped in the direction that her later work was to take.

True to the genre of lyrical poetry, her themes are eclectic, personal, and embracing - coming not from a singular agenda that seeks to send a "message," but from a consciousness that is humanistic and "universal." She writes of love, home, nature, melancholy, and loneliness. But the book also includes poems that are frank and open (for the times) in protesting American racism, foreseeing the militant African American "protest" poetry of the later '60s by such authors as Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, and Jayne Cortez.

It is not surprising that Madgett's literary growth has held a steady path forward. Nor is it surprising that her work has failed to attract attention from the popular media, which revels in a commercial output geared toward less discriminating tastes, for hers is a quiet voice:

Elaine With the late sun on your face And the golden clouds in your gray-green eyes.... With the zephyrs in your hair And the waning light of day in your smile.... Get out of the city - Go back to your hills.... Go back and find your happiness. ("Elaine," from Phantom Nightingale: Juvenilia)

Brown leaf catching too much sun, Gray street, too much rain. Who can tell a lonely heart Spring will come again? ("From the Shelter," from Phantom Nightingale: Juvenilia)

I feel your absence as I feel The winter's biting chill. ("In Absence," from Phantom Nightingale: Juvenilia)

Though in retrospect Madgett's poems about racism have some historical value, technically these poems are less successful. Many of the lines are obvious and redundant, and the "message" of the poems didactic, even banal: "Sing me a song for a Negro / Tell me where he is different" ("Song for a Negro," from Phantom Nightingale: Juvenilia). And a number of the poems are not above sentimentality: "Lord, I have sinned in that a bitter seed / Has borne its ripened fruit with my heart" ("Prayer for Forgiveness," from Phantom Nightingale: Juvenilia).

But these youthful poems are often redeemed by gems of lines such as: "Beneath the green a flame of scarlet leaps; / It is the first leaf turning, turning?" ("End of Summer," from One and the Many); "Ask the March skies how constant is your joy; / Consult the changing winds and sudden rain" ("Imperfectus," from One and the Many).

For the student or scholar interested in tracing the artistic development of a poet, Remembrances of Spring will become a collector's item. As one journeys through Madgett's published early works to her later mature poems, as reflected in her Octavia and Other Poems (1988), one can see the movement, the growth, steady but sure, to the sensitive poet and experienced technician she has become. An in-depth, scholarly study of the works of Naomi Long Madgett is long overdue.