What need have I for memory, When not a single flower Has bloomed within life’s desert For me, one little hour? What need have I for memory Whose burning eyes have met The corse of unborn happiness Winding the trail regret? WHEN I AM DEAD When I am dead, withhold, I pray, your blooming legacy; Beneath the willows did I bide, and they should cover me; I longed for light and fragrance, and I sought them far and near, O, it would grieve me utterly, to find them on my bier! THE DREAMS OF THE DREAMER The dreams of the dreamer Are life-drops that pass The break in the heart To the soul’s hour-glass. The songs of the singer Are tones that repeat The cry of the heart Till it ceases to beat. THE HEART OF A WOMAN The heart of a woman 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. The heart of a woman falls back with the night, And enters some alien cage in its plight, And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars. CLAUDE McKAY “I was born in a very little village high up in the hills of the parish of Clarendon in the island of Jamaica. The village was so small it hadn’t a name like the larger surrounding villages. But our place was called Sunny Ville. I was the youngest of eleven. My father was a peasant proprietor who owned his land and cultivated large tracts of coffee, cocoa, bananas and sugar-cane. When I was of school age I was sent to my brother who was a schoolmaster in a small town in the North-Western part of the island. He educated me. He was a free-thinker and I became one, too, so soon as I could think about life and religion. I was never a child of any church. My brother had a nice library with books of all sorts and I read such free-thought writers as Haeckel, Huxley, Matthew Arnold, side by side with Shakespeare and the great English novelists and poets (excepting Browning) before I was fourteen. At that time Shakespeare to me was only a wonderful story-teller. When I was seventeen I won a Jamaica Government Trade Scholarship and was apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and wheelwright. I hated trade and quit. When I was nineteen I joined the Jamaica Constabulary and left it after ten months. An English gentleman who was collecting Jamaica folklore became interested in my dialect verses and helped me to publish my first book: _Songs of Jamaica_, in 1911. I was twenty years old then. The next year I went to the United States. First to an educational institution for Negroes in the South. I did not like it, and left there after three months for a college in a Western state. There I stayed two years. Came to New York. Abandoned all thought of returning to the West Indies. Lost a few thousand dollars (a legacy) in high living and bad business. Went to work at various jobs, porter, houseman, longshoreman, bar-man, railroad club and hotel