Here’s the next poem in our series this Black History Month written by early 20th century Chicago poet Fenton Johnson. Like his “Dunbar” poem from earlier this week, “Waters of Forgetfulness” was found in his first book-length collection A Little Dreaming of 1913.
When I look through a poetry collection for material for this Project I think I’m following a few unspoken criteria. I’m looking for poems short enough to be performed in under 5 minutes. I’m looking for unusual qualities or points of view, or striking images, but I’ll also favor poems that seem to have something song-like about them. This one qualified on the first and last parts. The middle part? I thought it was an example of the range of cultural references that this young Black American poet wished to weave into his verse. Two lines in, and we’re not at the Clark Street Bridge in Chicago like Johnson’s contemporary Carl Sandburg, or looking at the Mississippi river and thinking of ancient historic rivers like Langston Hughes, a young poet who began writing a few years after Johnson. Instead, we’re at an imaginary river, the river Lethe, one of the rivers in Hades, the underworld of the dead in Greek/Roman mythology. Before we’re done, will meet an unnamed man from the fabled city of Troy and the final river border to Hades and the dead: the river Styx. What’s an under-25-year-old Black American doing there?
Here’s the poem as it appeared in “A Little Dreaming”
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When I selected this poem, I didn’t know. Partway into creating the musical performance you can hear below, I still didn’t know enough yet, but this is what I could understand to perform it: the poem’s speaker (let’s call him Johnson for simplicity) seeks the titular quality of the Lethe’s water, that it removes your memory of life.
I had to look up more about Lethe’s particulars to understand more: drinking its water allows the drinker the possibility of rebirth (without that forgetfulness, the reborn would be unable to gain a truly new life).
In the part of the poem that I made a bridge or second musical strain (lines 9-15) this rebirth is linked to some further material. Instinctively I felt it was this poem’s turn or volta, but what’s exactly happing there? Johnson is having a death experience; he sees at least in simile the Angel of Death. And in the penultimate line of this section, he’s glad to see morning. In between he sees himself as like some Trojan who crossed the final river into the land of the dead.
Who was this one from Troy? I had to do some research to find out.
He’s Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Latin poem The Aeneid. In that epic’s Book 6, by oracles, gods, and pluck, Aeneas completes a successful quest for a charmed golden bough and this refugee from the sacked city of Troy is able to cross the river Styx to the land of the dead, though for only a day. He passes through a condensed version of Dante’s circles to the happy land, where the most virtuous dead souls reside.* It’s there that Aeneas is reunited with the soul of his dead father. There are tears and hugs, and the father, now wise in the ways of the underworld, tells his son that Aeneas will go on to found Rome, and he foretells the mighty empire that will result. Then by one more skillful choice, as dawn is about to break, Aeneas is allowed to return from the underworld knowing the true aim of his task: to form a new nation.
You may wonder: I thought I was reading a poem published by a 25 year old young Black American, did I click a link to footnotes for a section of “The Waste Land” (published 9 years later) instead? Let me deal with two last things before leaving off for the musical performance.
Remember that middle “Temporarily Like Aeneas” section is a simile, framed in “like” and “as.” I take this to mean that the poem’s speaker isn’t the ancient Trojan, it’s most likely Fenton Johnson, or someone like him, seeking to take up the task of becoming a bard to his race, in his nation, in his time. That means this is a dream poem, in a collection that has other poems as dreams or visions — and is after all titled A Little Dreaming. Johnson and his Afro-Americans have a lot one might bargain to forget, a harrowing dream to wake up from to live a new life. I started thinking this poem was a curious small example of Johnson’s range of subjects and modes. I’ve grown to think it’s making a serious Black History Month point. When this sleeper awakes, glad in the morn, he knows there’s a nation to build and he’s seen his goal.
And here’s the second point. Virgil might have been a more standard curriculum item at the start of the 20th century than he was in my mid-century, or in your 21st — but how many readers then or now will understand the reference Johnson’s making? I didn’t. Maybe you didn’t. This poem may have been written by the poet to the bard himself, to focus him on his calling. Or perhaps he overestimated his potential audience? We’ll return to that last point elsewhere in the series, providing I can complete all the parts I’d like to share this month.
The music for this is fairly straightforward, though I had some fun sound-engineering the grand piano heard in the left channel. This is another of the pieces where I do my best to represent the poem with my singing, even though I fear this composition calls out for a more spectacular singer. You can hear it with the audio player gadget you should see below. No vision of an audio player? This highlighted link is an alternative, it’ll open a new page with its own audio player.
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*Unlike me, Dante had read Virgil, and this section helped him formulate his circles of Hell. Virgil writes, and perhaps young poet Johnson is noting this: this happy place in the afterlife includes the noble bards of nations.
Frank Hudson 