A Haunting Little Poem

Here is a poem by Arna Bontemps (1902-1972), novelist, poet, editor, nonfiction writer, and children's author--and a member of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes and Bontemps were the best of friends):



Length of Moon



Then the golden hour
Will tick its last
And the flame will go down in the flower.


A briefer length of moon
Will mark the sea-line and the yellow dune.


Then we may think of this, yet
There will be something forgotten
And something we should forget.


It will be like all things we know:
A stone will fail; a rose is sure to go.


It will be quiet then and we may stay
Long at the picket gate, --
But there will be less to say.



The poem first appeared in the magazine FIRE!!, edited by Wallace Thurman and other younger members of the Harlem Renaissance, and published in 1926. Like a lot of little magazines ("little" referring simply to circulation and subsequently connotating a literary magazine), this one survived but one issue.

Bontemps' poem is one of those wonderful but small poems that get lost in the shuffling of literary history. Such poems may not end up in one of the well known anthologies and therefore their fate is left to libraries and/or to a few scholars who may study the author. Such poems are not lesser in quality than many of the much-anthologized poems and are greater in quality, arguably, than some very famous poems. I call Bontemps' poem "little" only because it is an unpretentious, one-page lyric poem; in other ways, it's big.

Bontemps invents a form for himself here--a three-line stanza rhyming aba, followed by rhyming-couplet stanza. The voice of the poem is understated, and the images are terrific. Any poem that announces itself as being about the moon will cause temporary concern because we fear a cliche is coming, but with Bontemps' poem, there's no cause for worry. The images echo those found in Zen poetry or the poems of Rumi; they are sharp but not forced to carry large symbolism. The poem unfolds quickly but quietly until suddenly we realize that it is, in part, about a couple; perhaps they are courting; perhaps they realize the relationship isn't going well; we can't say for sure. All we know is that "there will be less to say." I think the intentional (apparently) ambiguity works superbly there. Whatever is going on with the (two?) people, "there will be less to say" after they have experienced, together, the image of monnlight on dunes and the sea-line. And in way, after we experience such a scene, there should be less to say, for the scene has said something, has pierced us with some kind of meaning, some change in consciousness. When I first read the poem, I didn't expect it to end at the "picket gate," with "less to say." It's a surprising ending, but not a melodramatic one. It's a haunting poem, but it's by no means a gothic moon-poem or a cliche moon-love-poem. I admire its spare strength, its restraint, its capacity to arrange the images so that they communicate multiple meanings. I love the image of the flame going down in the flower, as if flowers were small lamps, the wicks of which were turned down at dusk.

"There will be something forgotten/And something we should forget." How cryptic! What will they forget? Surely they won't remember every detail of the scene. What should they forget? Harsh words? Some kind of betrayal? The lines that follow don't "answer" the questions raised by the previous lines. Instead they give the bigger answer: all things pass, not just a rose, which we know is short-lived, but also stones, which will be eroded or otherwise disintegrate, and which--as parts of foundations--will fail.

A coda: Bontemps wrote a terrfic novel, better known than this poem but probably still under-rated, called Black Thunder, which retells the story of a slave-rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser.