An important editor in the Harlem Renaissance and an Australian poet who spent time in Paraguay. A patriotic poem by the birthday poet.
The date is August 16th, Friday, and today I’m traveling from Rochester, NY to Portland OR in the USA.
Today is the birthday of Wallace Thurman, African American editor and writer.
Wallace Thurman was a member of the Harlem Renaissance in New York during the late 1920s. He edited several small newspapers and had relationships with writers and artists such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn Bennett.
He believed that the struggle of African Americans – the good and the bad – should be acknowledged and explored. As two scholars put it, Thurman felt that “the black writer need not pander to the aesthetic preferences of the black middle class, nor should he or she write for an easy and patronizing white approval.” (Get the book here: The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader)
Thurman was darker skinned than many of his peers and was keenly aware of how he was treated differently because of it. He was thus interested in intra-racial prejudice, or colorism. His thoughts and feeling on the subject are best captured in his 1929 novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life.
Today is the birthday of Dame Mary Gilmore, Australian journalist and poet.
After working as a teacher early on in her career, Mary Gilmore left the profession around 1890 at the age of 25. Teaching in primarily rural and mining communities in Australia left her with socialist sympathies and a notebook of early poems.
She would move to Sydney and join a group of socialist writers writing for change. They were called the “Bulletin school” after The Bulletin, a popular Australian periodical publish much of the writers’ work.
At the age of 30, Mary moved to Paraguay to join a couple hundred social idealists in “New Australia” a communal settlement started a few years earlier. While there she married William Gilmore and gave birth to a son.
In 1900 the community was struggling and disbanded without much ado. Having lived in a communal settlement, Mary Gilmore and her husband moved to Buenos Aires for several months to work and save for passage back to Australia. They made it back in 1902 and set up on a farm.
Gilmore continued to write for newspapers and periodicals upon her return and published her first collection of poetry in 1910. She remained concerned with workers’ reform, child welfare, and justice for the indigenous people of Australia.
In 1937 Mary Gilmore was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire for her literary contributions. At her death, she was awarded a full state funeral, uncommon for writers. Her likeness is featured on the back of the current Australia ten-note.
Her most famous poem was written during WWII. It is titled “No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest” and is our poem today.
No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest
Dame Mary Gilmore
Sons of the mountains of Scotland,
Welshmen of coomb and defile,
Breed of the moors of England,
Children of Erin’s green isle,
We stand four square to the tempest,
Whatever the battering hail-
No foe shall gather our harvest,
Or sit on our stockyard rail.
Our women shall walk in honour,
Our children shall know no chain,
This land, that is ours forever,
The invader shall strike at in vain.
Anzac!…Tobruk!…and Kokoda!…
Could ever the old blood fail?
No foe shall gather our harvest,
Or sit on our stockyard rail.
So hail-fellow-met we muster,
And hail-fellow-met fall in,
Wherever the guns may thunder,
Or the rocketing air-mail spin!
Born of the soil and the whirlwind,
Though death itself be the gale-
No foe shall gather our harvest
Or sit on our stockyard rail.
We are the sons of Australia,
of the men who fashioned the land;
We are the sons of the women
Who walked with them hand in hand;
And we swear by the dead who bore us,
By the heroes who blazed the trail,
No foe shall gather our harvest,
Or sit on our stockyard rail.