Dawn

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1912

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Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“A Banjo Song” by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1896)

To understand the complexity of Dunbar’s poetry is to read a selection of his dialect poetry. In contrast to the elegant standard English poetics of “Dawn,” this poem—one of Dunbar’s most widely anthologized and most widely loved—sings of the simple pleasures of banjo-picking in the plantation era. The depiction of the simple, happy Black folks enjoying the simple, happy music is rendered in pitch perfect dialect that demands recitation as the fractured lines capture the rhythms, syntax, and diction of the English of the era’s undereducated Black people.

“To Autumn” by John Keats (1820)

Dunbar saw himself in the tradition of the British Romantics, and most notably, John Keats. Much like “Dawn,” “To Autumn” captures the spiritual, even magical feeling of Nature (capitalized), in its stately progression of the seasons. Keats seeks to endow with wonder such apparently ordinary natural phenomena: the turning of the leaves in the fall and the sudden gusts of autumnal winds. Like Dunbar’s in “Dawn,” the lines are carefully crafted, the rhythm and rhyme schemes are deftly patterned and subtly musical. Dunbar embraced this kind of elevated poetry and regarded such poetry, rather than the dialect poems, as the highest calling of the poet.

“I’ll tell you how the Sun rose (Poem 204)” by Emily Dickinson

It is only a problem of chronology that Dunbar would write “Dawn” in an era in which the work of Emily Dickinson, although written before Dunbar was born, would not be widely published. Although Dunbar in “Dawn” follows a more conventional prosody and Dickinson forged her own idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and rhyme, the sentiment expressed in Dickinson’s celebration of the stunning wonder of a simple sunrise echoes Dunbar’s thematic argument. Like Dunbar’s figure of the lone man observing the magic, both apart and a part, Dickinson compares the poet to a guest in a “stupendous Parlor.”

Further Literary Resources

“Paul Laurence Dunbar and Turn-into-the Twentieth-Century African American Dualism” by James E. Smethurst (2007)

The article, first published in the African American Review, is representative of the ongoing rediscovery and repositioning of Dunbar and his poetry. The essay explores the “double consciousness” of African American poets of the era. Because post-Reconstruction America regarded African Americans as both “citizens and not citizens,” Dunbar explored poetic expression in heightened and elegant diction of the British Romantics and in the dialectic language of the Black “folks” he knew and stories of whom his mother, a freed slave, shared with him.

“Factoring Out Race: The Cultural Context of Paul Laurence Dunbar” by David E. Bradley (2007)

A probing evaluation of how to assess Dunbar’s status as a poet which considers whether his status as a landmark figure in American literature hinges on his racial identity. His poetry other than his dialectic works (among them “Dawn”) could be dismissed as derivative and sentimental. Factor in his race, his minimal education, his self-taught poetics, his autodidacticism, and the slender market open to Black poetry, and those same derivative and sentimental poems become invaluable as cultural artifacts, and point to Dunbar mastering a kind of “reverse minstrel show” in which—in a kind of white-face performance—he perfectly copied those elements of the white poetry he admired.

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrews (2022)

This text is an important biographical and critical study of Dunbar, the first in more than 30 years, which explores Dunbar’s perception of himself as a poet who happens to be Black rather than a Black poet who aspired to be considered as America’s Keats. The brief analysis of “Dawn” scans the poem for its carefully wrought rhythm and tightly designed rhymes and suggests that despite its delightful singsong nature of the poem, it shows Dunbar’s (entirely self-taught) command of the intricate prosody of the British Romantics.

Listen to Poem

Arna Bontemps recite Dunbar’s “Dawn”

The most stately and impactful recitation of “Dawn” is by Black poet and novelist Arna Bontemps, recorded in 1970 as part of the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings Project. The deep husk of Bontemps’s Louisiana drawl and the loving way he expresses the music of Dunbar’s intricate vowel and consonant interplay offers a moving read of Dunbar’s lyric poem.