———. Harlem’s Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900–1950.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Heart of a Woman and Other Poems, The
Georgia Douglas Johnson(1918)
The first volume of published poems by WASHING-
TON, D.C., poet GEORGIADOUGLASJOHNSON.A
graduate of ATLANTAUNIVERSITY, in the class of
1896, she married Henry Lincoln Johnson, a Geor-
gia attorney who was appointed recorder of deeds
for the District of Columbia in 1912 by President
Taft. Despite her husband’s belief that wives
should concentrate on domestic matters, Georgia
Douglas Johnson continued to write, publish, and
take a leadership role in Washington’s literary and
cultural circles.
The Cornhill Company of Boston published
The Heart of a Woman,a collection of 30 poems
that Johnson dedicated to her husband. WILLIAM
STANLEYBRAITHWAITEprovided the foreword to
the volume. The Boston writer and editor praised
the deep emotional quality of the works, suggesting
that this aspect ensured that the poems were
“deeply human.” Braithwaite went on to suggest
that in the 20th century, the “emancipation of
woman is yet to be wholly accomplished” and that
the “heart of a woman” was still a realm of mystery
for many. “We are yet scarcely aware,” he intoned,
“of what lies deeply hidden, of mystery and passion,
of domestic love and joy and sorrow, of romantic vi-
sions and practical ambitions.” Braithwaite praised
Johnson for the “sense of infinite sympathy” that
she produced in her poems and concluded that the
poet’s own heart was “keyed in the plaintive, knows
the sorrowful agents of life and experience which
knock and enter at the door of dreams.” He con-
cluded his breathless praise for the volume with the
declaration that “It is a kind of privilege to know so
much about the secrets of woman’s nature, a privi-
lege all the more to be cherished when given as in
these poems, with such exquisite utterance, with
such a lyric sensibility.”
The first poem in the collection is “The Heart
of a Woman.” This popular two-stanza poem of
eight lines, which was included in JAMESWELDON
JOHNSON’s The BOOK OFAMERICANNEGROPO-
ETRY(1922) and many other collections, presents a
haunting vision of a woman’s heart. The poem sug-
gests that a woman’s heart “goes forth with the
dawn / As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on
/ Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam / In
the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.”
Despite these freedoms and migrations, how-
ever, the heart of a woman is not free. Johnson
imagines that it “enters some alien cage... / And
tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars / While it
breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.” Her
work invoked the painful imagery of Paul Laurence
Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” in which a captive
bird beats its wings against the unyielding bars of
its cage. The poem is a steady meditation on unre-
alized ambitions and the pain that can emerge
from domesticity. Other poems further advanced
Johnson’s considerations of dreams unrealized.
“The Dream of the Dreamer,” one of several two-
stanza, eight-line poems in the book, declares that
the dreamer’s dreams are “life-drops that pass /
The break in the heart / To the soul’s hour-glass.”
The poems “Quest” and others contribute to the
volume’s power. They are a chief vehicle through
which Johnson placed an unmistakable emphasis
on the finite aspects of life and the seemingly un-
avoidable extinction of dreams.
Poems such as “Elevation” introduced an up-
lifting mood into the volume. “Elevation,” a six-
line poem framed by its a/b/c/b/c/a rhyme scheme,
opened with a thoughtful statement that “There
are highways in the soul.” The poem ends with
that same line, but an exclamation point intensifies
the statement and transforms it into an exultant
assertion.
Other poems, such as “Sympathy,” “Mate,”
and “Mirrored,” herald the close ties that can exist
between people, whether lovers or family members.
“My joy leaps with your ecstasy / In sympathy di-
vine,” declares the sensitive speaker of “Sympa-
thy.” Johnson’s telltale fascination with pain
emerges here too. The poem ends with visions of
one person’s “tears falling... like bitter rain” into
the heart of the empathetic speaker.
Johnson explored the links between the natural
world and humanity in poems such as “Peace,”
“Pent,” “Recall,” “Impelled,” and “Eventide.” In
“Pent,” the speaker is able to defy the easy use of the
natural as a metaphor for human experience.
“The rain is falling steadily / Upon the thirsty earth,”
the narrator declares. Yet, “dry-eyed, I remain,”Heart of a Woman and Other Poems, The 229