“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.