Explore the poem

This poem is a sonnet – a particular kind of poem with 14 lines. This one is divided into an 8-line section called an octet and a 6-line section called a sestet. Read it aloud, leaving a 2-3 second pause between the octet and the sestet. What is similar and different about the two sections of the poem?

Think about the strong images of miners walking home in the octet. What do they look like? What are they carrying? Where are they going? How are they moving and speaking?

Think about the images of moonlight over farm land in the sestet. What features of the landscape are illuminated?

An emotional landscape is also illuminated here. Each time a word suggests sadness to you, say it more quietly than the last one, so that when you get to ‘bitter’ in the last line your voice is barely audible, as if it is also being ‘washed away’.

Do a little research to find out about the time Margaret Walker is writing about and what tragedy that part of the world had seen, as shown in the poem.

About Margaret Walker

Margaret Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, but her family moved to New Orleans when she was still young. She received her education in New Orleans before moving to Chicago for university. In 1936 she joined the Federal Writers’ Project, a government programme designed to create work for writers during this period of economic depression. Walker’s poetry first appeared in The Crisis magazine, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a very influential civil rights organisation. In the 1940s she published her first poetry collection For My People, one of the most significant works of the Chicago Black Renaissance, a literary movement which included poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

Walker began teaching at Jackson State College in Mississippi in 1949. She worked there for the next thirty years and founded an institute dedicated to African-American history, life and culture that still exists today. During this time she published two more collections of poetry and perhaps her most famous work, her only novel Jubilee, in 1966. In the 1960s very few novels had been written about this period of American history by an African-American woman, and so Jubilee proved to be a very influential work for other black writers. Walker retired from teaching in 1979 and her final poetry collection, This Is My Century, was released ten years later. She died in Chicago in 1998.