Explore the poem

Dunbar’s love poem, addressed to his ‘dear Love’, employs imagery which is often associated with romance. The first three lines mention the sun, moon and stars and elsewhere in the poem there are references to the nesting ‘dove’, ‘blossom’, ‘heart’ and ‘summer’. Even when he mentions winter, the atmosphere of the poem is not threatened, as he describes the snows with the soft‑sounding word ‘drifting’. Notice how the much‑repeated ‘come’, which Dunbar uses seven times in the first octet and five times in the final octet, builds in both cases to the notion that his love will be ‘welcome’ whenever she does visit him, whatever the time or season.

The quatrain that separates the octets describes the recipient of his love as ‘soft’ and ‘sweet’, and he longs for his heart to be brought ‘to rest’.

How does the rhythm and rhyme support the simplicity and sincerity of Dunbar’s love poem?

About Paul Dunbar

Paul Dunbar was one of the first African-American poets to be widely known and admired in America. His parents were freed slaves and Dunbar used some of their tales of plantation life in his work.

After a successful reading at the World’s Fair in Chicago, Dunbar’s poems were picked up by national newspapers and magazines. His second collection, Majors and Minors, appeared in 1895, with the ‘majors’ representing poems written in standard English and the ‘minors’ referring to his very successful dialect poems.

Dunbar’s fame spread, and he travelled to England to give readings. On returning to America, he worked at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and married the writer Alice Ruth Moore. However, his health began to deteriorate and, although he continued to be a prolific writer, producing several novels, song lyrics and further collections of poems, he died of tuberculosis in 1906, at the age of thirty‑three.

Read more about Paul Dunbar in the
American National Biography