November 7, 2003

Traversing Clio (4)

Vivaldi Veiled

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In 1928, W.E.B. Du Bois published Dark Princess, his novel about the love affair between an African American man, Matthew Towns, and an Indian woman, Princess Kautilya. The novel seemed to be a farfetched romance, one that many would find too hard to digest. Nonetheless, it spoke to a social and political condition that was coming into being, a new global sensibility. The worlds of India and Afro-America were brought together through the auspices of anti-colonial radicals meeting in Europe, and after the male protagonist has been sucked into the vortex of Chicago politics and the cash-nexus (the summer of opportunity crashing into a long winter of discontent), a spring comes in an interracial transcendence through the realization of the proximity of Virginia and the Punjab. With the world on the verge of witnessing economic depression, Nazism, and war, culminating in the beginning of a long period of successful and unsuccessful anti-colonial insurgencies, Du Bois’ novel must be considered prescient. And w ith his structuring of the novel in accordance with the changing seasons, the lyrical passages that commence each section of the book (transcribed and edited into poetic form) act as racialized counterpoints to classical renderings of the four seasons.

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Summer

Summer is come

with bursting flower

and promise of perfect fruit.

Rain is rolling down

both Nile and Niger.

Summer sings on the sea

where giant ships

carry busy worlds,

while mermaids swarm the shores.

Earth is pregnant;

life is big with pain

of evil

and of hope.

Summer in blue New York;

summer in gray Berlin;

summer in the heart

of a red, red world!

Fall

Fall of leaf and sigh of wind.

Gasp of the world-soul before

– in crimson, gold, and gray –

it dips beneath the looming shadow

of death.

Fall on the vast gray-green Atlantic,

where waves of all waters

heave and groan

toward bitter storms to come.

Fall in the crowded streets of New York.
Fall in the heart of the world.

Winter

Winter, jail and death.

Winter, three winters long,

with only the green of two short springs,

and the crimson of two short autumns;

but ever with hard, cold winter

in triumph over all.

Cold streets and hard faces;

white death in a white world;

but underneath the ice,

fire from heaven,

burning back to life

the poor and black and guilty,

the hopeless and unbelieving,

the suave and terrible.

Dirt and frost,

slush and diamonds,

amid the roar of winter in Chicago.

Spring

The miracle is spring.

Spring in the heart and throat of the world;

spring in Virginia.

spring in India.

spring in Chicago.

Shining rain and crimson song,

roll and thunder of symphony

in color,

shade of tint of flower

and vine

and budding leaf.

But what if spring

should dip down to winter

and die,

shall not a lovelier spring live

again?

Love is eternal spring.

Life lifts itself

Out of the winter

of death.

Children sing in mud and rain

and wind.

Earth climbs aloft

and sits astride

the weeping skies.

© Rob Gregg, 2003