Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, April 18th.

And yesterday was Easter Sunday, and so today I'm going to read for you an Easter poem by poet Claude McKay.

Festus Claudius McKay was born in 1889 and he lived until 1948.

He was known throughout his life as Claude, Claude McKay.

He was a Jamaican American writer and a very important poet in the Harlem Renaissance,

which was a movement of black artists and poets and songwriters, authors who came together in the 20th century

to celebrate and promote black culture in America. Important figures in the Harlem Renaissance

also include Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, and W.E.B. Dubois. Claude McKay wrote this poem called

the Easter flower, and this is how it goes. Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly,

my soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground, where gleamed theac-tented easter lily soft scented in the air for yards around alone without a hint of guardian leaf just like a fragile bell of silver rhyme it burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief in the young, pregnant year

at Easter time. And many thought it was a sacred sign, and some called it the resurrection

flower. And I, a pagan, worshipped at its shrine, yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.

Claude McKay was an atheist, but the poem seems to be attempting to honor the

repeating patterns of death and renewal that we see in the natural world.

Claude McKay was also an activist poet, but perhaps we can connect the central image and

idea of the Easter Lily with his call to action on behalf of oppressed people, just as the

Easter lily bulb is buried in the ground and bursts into life early in spring around Easter time.

So perhaps he seems to see that pattern as hopeful in a world that is difficult and buried and dead.

But mostly, though, this is a pretty simple poem of hope and contemplation through the natural world in spring, which is a time of renewal. The poem is three

stanzas long, made of regular rhythm and meter and rhyme. It's written an iambic pentameter with an

A-B-A-B-Ryme scheme, which seems to be calling attention to the poem's simplicity and accessibility.

This is a poem about a man looking at a flower at Easter and thinking about death and renewal and

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