Dawn

First published in 1895 in a collection that immediately found an admiring market, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Dawn”—a lyrical celebration of the quiet beauty of day’s first light—seems to epitomize late-century high Victorian poetics in both form and theme. In an exquisitely compact four lines, the poem is carefully metered, carefully rhymed, and conforms to expectations about how a poem should look and sound dating back to antiquity. Thematically, the poem offers a reassuring insight into the beauty of nature drawing from the Romantics’ tradition dating back nearly a century and during which sensitive poets found unsuspected inspiration in the play of nature—an appreciation of the profligate richness nature displays.

The poem, however, is not extraordinary due to its form or theme, but its author. Dunbar was a 20-something African American, high school educated young man, working as an elevator operator in a bank building in downtown Dayton, Ohio. His second collection of poems, Majors and Minors—in which “Dawn” first appeared—offered Dunbar his first national recognition as a poet of genuine promise by a predominately white critical establishment that grappled with the implications of a Black man producing such white poetry. To quote William Dean Howells—the editor of Harper’s—Dunbar’s poetry embodied such “white thinking and white feeling in a black man.