"My Heart Has Known its Winter

A Poem by Arna Bontemps.

Arna Bontemps

A little while spring will claim its own,
In all the land around for mile on mile
Tender grass will hide the rugged stone.
My still heart will sing a little while.

And men will never think this wilderness
Was barren once when grass is over all,
Hearing laughter they may never guess
My heart has known its winter and carried gall.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 18, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
 

None of this essay is original. It comes from the website A Poem A Day, published by The Academy of American Poets.

I am honoring Martin Luther King Day.

About this Poem

"My Heart Has Known Its Winter" by Arna Bontemps appears in Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea (OPPORTUNITY: Journal of Negro Life, 1927), edited by Charles S. Johnson.

In his essay, "Arna Bontemps: The "Louisiana Heritage," published in Callaloo in 1981, African American literature critic and historian Nicholas Canaday noted, "Arna Bontemps thought of himself as a poet first, despite the fact that he was regarded in the Thirties as a novelist. His decision to move to Harlem in August of 1924 was partly motivated, he said years later, by his reading of Claude McKay's book of poetry called Harlem Shadows." Canaday went on to note that at the time of the publication of "My Heart Has Known Its Winter," "Bontemps's poem 'Nocturne at Bethesda'—perhaps his best poem, certainly the one most anthologized—won the [Crisis] poetry award [given by W. E. B. Du Bois] in 1927. Earlier winners had included Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. Bontemps also became a close friend of Countee Cullen, whose book of poems entitled [sic] Color (1925) Bontemps always considered the most important work of the early period of the Harlem Renaissance."