George Moses Horton, Myself
I feel myself in need
Of the inspiring strains of ancient lore,
My heart to lift, my empty mind to feed,
And all the world explore.
I know that I am old
And never can recover what is past,
But for the future may some light unfold
And soar from ages blast.
I feel resolved to try,
My wish to prove, my calling to pursue,
Or mount up from the earth into the sky,
To show what Heaven can do.
My genius from a boy,
Has fluttered like a bird within my heart;
But could not thus confined her powers employ,
Impatient to depart.
She like a restless bird,
Would spread her wing, her power to be unfurl’d,
And let her songs be loudly heard,
And dart from world to world.
(1865)
George Moses Horton, the first African American to publish a book in the US south, was born into slavery on the William Horton tobacco plantation in North Carolina, circa 1798.
His passion for literature manifested itself in childhood. He succeeded in teaching himself to spell and read, and found a source of particular inspiration in Charles Wesley’s hymns. Later, on a different estate in Chatham County, his work included delivering fruit to the University of North Carolina, where some of the collegians took an interest in his writing, and lent him various books, The Beauties of Shakespeare, Paradise Lost and extracts from Homer and Virgil among them. He had yet to learn how to write down his poems. In the autobiographical essay preceding his second collection, he captures the flightpath of oral composition: “At any critical juncture, when anything momentous transpired, such as death, misfortune, disappointment and the like, it generally passed off my mind like the chant of birds after a storm.”
Acclaimed by his audience, Horton hoped to earn enough from his first collection, The Hope of Liberty (1829), to buy his freedom. This ambition remained unfulfilled, but he was able to negotiate some periods of time in which to continue writing. He remained enslaved until 1865, the year in which his third and final collection, Naked Genius, was published. He spent the last years of his freedom in Philadelphia, and died circa 1880.
Horton wrote directly about the miseries of enslavement in such poems as Division of an Estate. But in this week’s poem he looks specifically at the struggle to liberate his genius as a writer. He introduces himself in the title. Bearing the name of the Horton family, the slavers’ name that once spelled his oppression, George Moses Horton makes the title itself a declaration of his self-forged and unique identity.
Writing in the present tense, he seems to reinhabit his early struggle. “I feel myself in need / Of the inspiring strains of ancient lore, / My heart to lift, my empty mind to feed, / And all the world explore.” The acknowledgment in the second stanza, “I know that I am old”, reveals that something bigger than recollection is at work. He presents us with a speaker who, despite his achievement, is still possessed by a passionate desire to continue to learn and grow.
Figuring the fluttering bird as the image of poetic genius, the fourth stanza recalls the prose passage quoted above, describing oral poetic composition as “the chant of birds after a storm”. The bird now represents both liberation and articulacy. There’s a poignant realism in the speaker’s admission that his own losses can never be restored. But his hope is that “the future may some light unfold / And soar from ages blast”. Eras of oppression and destruction resonate in that brief phrase, “ages blast”.
The language of the whole poem, like the metre, owes some its power to his Wesleyan inheritance, with its vividly evoked contrast between earthly hell and divine resurrection. The quest for art is also a quest for heaven.
With her power still “to be unfurl’d”, the bird that represents the “restless” longings of Horton’s youth is wished a soaring freedom still to be won. No bitterness infects the gentle tone: the past seems to contain a deep well of future hope. In his older years, George Moses Horton is still passionately himself, finding the idealism and strength to sing and “dart from world to world”. The image is delicate and insistent. It suggests a collective aspiration beyond the poem and its writer: our own “world” is included in the vision.
