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Dunbar's Georgics 127.4 ] “Work and Wait Unwearying”: Dunbar’s Georgics margaret ronda AUL LAURENCE DUNBAR’S LEGACY AS A POET HAS BEEN LARGELY P determined by the critical debates about his dialect poetry. he persistent emphasis on dialect originates in William Dean Howells’s description, in his introduction to Dunbar’s 1896 Lyrics of Lowly Life, of the poet’s dialect verse as the marker of his “artistic completeness.” Dunbar’s dialect poems, Howells argues, illuminate the “precious diference of temperament between the races” and of- fer unique “divinations and reports of what passes in the hearts and minds of a lowly people” (xvii–xviii). Howells’s pronouncement on the aesthetic merit of Dunbar’s poetry reverberates across a century of criticism that debates the capacity of dialect to graph racial difer- ence.1 Whether inluenced by New Negro tenets, Black Arts politics, or poststructuralist or new historicist reading practices, however, Dunbar’s critical readers oten share Howells’s verdict that dialect po- etry represents Dunbar’s most notable achievement, even if they do not share Howell’s patronizing rhetoric.2 hese critics’ methodologi- cally divergent readings all regard linguistic diference, codiied in dialect’s orthography and rhythms, as the key measure of racialized expression in Dunbar’s poetics. hey force his poetry into the neatly dichotomous categories “standard” and “dialect” and foreground the literary coding of racial authenticity as his poetry’s essential stake.3 However instructive these dialect debates have proved, they have necessarily circumscribed critical approaches to Dunbar’s various MARGARET RONDA, an assistant pro- body of work. While racial performance, as Gavin Jones’s Strange fessor of English at Rutgers University, Talk cogently argues, is a central dimension of in de siècle Ameri- New Brunswick, teaches modern and contemporary American poetry. She can culture, its pervasiveness in critical discourse on Dunbar has is at work on a book manuscript titled overshadowed his perhaps more powerful considerations of every- “Remainders: Poetry at Nature’s End.” day racial constraint. In this essay, I argue that such constraint is [ © 2012 by the modern language association of america ] 863 864 “Work and Wait Unwearying”: Dunbar’s Georgics [ PMLA vividly present in Dunbar’s portrayals of la- cive means of restricting black mobility and bor and that these georgic meditations rep- extracting compulsory labor, these poems resent his most incisive thinking about the disarticulate manual labor from discourses hardships of African American life in the of racial self- improvement and emancipation. post- Reconstruction era. In Dunbar’s dialect At the same time, Dunbar’s georgics assert and standard- En glish poetry, labor is the irst the sympathetic humanity and blamelessness principle, the common necessity, of life itself. of African Americans in the face of virulent As Dunbar puts it in “he Seedling,” “Every institutional racism. child must share life’s labor / Just as well as To shift critical emphasis from perfor- every man.” he master trope of labor bears mance to work is to turn from questions of a racial inlection in Dunbar’s work: labor as authenticity, accommodation, and subver- suffering without redemption remains the sion to different representational issues in lot of a burdened few. For African Ameri- Dunbar’s writing: those of necessity and con- cans at century’s end, life is work—diicult, straint. By foregrounding its georgic strain, I necessary, and often without reward. The argue that Dunbar’s poetry deemphasizes ro- overarching theme of many Dunbar poems mantic portrayals of poetic enslavement or re- echoes a key passage in Vergil’s Georgics: “Ev- sistance in favor of an examination of labor’s erything / was toil, relentless toil, urged on tragic, nonredemptive nature. While capitalist by need” (1.145–46). Georgic poems deine la- modernity is deined above all by the transi- bor as grounded in lack, as necessary for bare tion from slave labor to “free” labor—to a sys- survival, and as hostage to larger forces that tem in which workers own and sell their labor threaten to undermine its progress—themes power—Dunbar’s poetry illustrates a mode of that echo throughout Dunbar’s verse.4 labor that its neither category. he problem Dunbar’s sustained emphasis on the of occupying this nebulous middle ground be- work of life responds to the labor- centered tween modes of production, where the laborer racial problems of his historical moment: the is neither free nor enslaved, is at the heart emergent forms of conscripted labor and the of these georgics, which depict the African enduring reduction, both discursively and American subject as consigned to an inferior materially, of African Americans to laborers position by forces of economic modernization. rather than citizens. His georgics articulate If the georgic encodes confrontations between an imaginative “turning South,” to borrow transhistorical understandings of work (as ef- a phrase from Houston Baker, Jr., present- fort, burden, foundation of civilization) and ing the hard agrarian work characteristic of labor’s historically specific determinations, the rural Black Belt as the image of African Dunbar’s georgics reveal the material efects American life at the turn of the century (26). of the uneven modernization of racialized la- I focus here on georgics from Lyrics of Lowly bor in the post- Reconstruction era. Life, Dunbar’s irst commercially published book and a text relecting larger debates over “The Shadow of a Deep Disappointment” African American productivity as a precon- dition for participation in national life. In Georgic derives from the Greek terms for its images of labor without respite or recom- “earth” or “field” and “work,” and georgic pense, Lyrics of Lowly Life represents Dun- poetry attends to manual and particularly bar’s most sustained response to the agrarian agricultural labor, taking the laborer as its myth of racial freedom achieved through ag- central protagonist (Lilly 20). Georgic poetry, ricultural work. Written in the context of Jim from its roots in Hesiod and Vergil forward, Crow laws, vagrancy statutes, and other coer- “argue[s] against . the idealism of a natu- 127.4 ] Margaret Ronda 865 ral spontaneity,” of imagination or earthly these polarities than to illuminate how they bounty, and instead insists on the need for operate in a speciic historical context. In the sustained and correctly applied efort (Put- case of Dunbar’s poetry, his georgics examine nam 152). Work is compulsory and diicult, what W. E. B. DuBois calls the “double- aimed undertaken in the face of potential failure, struggle of the black artisan” in the postbel- and valued for the hard- won knowledge it lum years—“on the one hand to escape white yields. In Vergil’s Georgics, the master text of contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood this mode, the ravages of disease and blight, and drawers of water, and on the other hand the unknowable whims of the gods, the vicis- to plough and nail and dig for a poverty- situdes of political turmoil, and the ruinous stricken horde”—a struggle that necessarily power of storms shadow the everyday labors ends in disappointed failure, despite the la- of the farmer. he achievements of manual ef- borer’s earnest eforts (6). fort are continually threatened by the entropy Dunbar’s invocation of georgic themes of natural and historical forces. In a georgic, is not sui generis but emerges from a long- the farmer inhabits a diminished world where standing, if little acknowledged, georgic tra- hard work and the knowledge that this work dition in American literature. As Timothy generates guarantee neither rest nor reward. Sweet points out in his American Georgics: The georgic mode thus contains what Economy and Environment in Early American Anthony Low calls a “double vision” of labor Literature, georgic has largely been subsumed as at once a “curse and a blessing” (11). Work into pastoral in American literary criticism, alone, in a georgic poem, has the potential to such that the inheritance of georgic is rechan- civilize the self, master the chaotic forces of neled into broader interpretations of envi- nature, and stabilize society. Yet labor is also ronmental literature or what Leo Marx calls the sign of the reduced nature of human life, “complex pastoral” (Sweet 2–3).5 Yet the two its everyday sufering, and stands for the need modes are distinct, as Joseph Addison’s 1697 for discipline to combat the entropic forces “Essay on the Georgics” points out. Addison that threaten survival. In their attention to characterizes pastoral and georgic as diver- the dual nature of work, georgics illuminate gent “class[es]” of poetry: where the pastoral the polarities evident in the etymologies of employs a deliberately simplified or rustic labor and work. Hannah Arendt points out style that imitates its shepherd protagonists, in he Human Condition, “All the European the georgic offers “instructions” in its de- words for ‘labor’ . signify pain and efort scriptions of rural life, expressing “moral and are also used for pangs of birth. Labor duties” and “philosophical speculations” has the same etymological root as labare (“to through its representations of the processes stumble under a burden”); ponos [Greek] of everyday work. Georgic didacticism oc- and Arbeit [German] have the same etymo- cupies a simultaneously narrow and broad logical roots as ‘poverty’” (48). Yet labor also frame of reference, conveying what Addison carries the positive meaning of industry that calls the “rules of practice” of agrarian labor produces worthy ends (“Labour”). The ety- and inquiring into their connection to larger mology of work similarly stresses necessity historical forces such as the nation- state, im- and painfulness, as well as the moral quality perial expansion, and global commerce (155). of efort and the achievement of the artifact With critics such as William Dowling, Larry produced (“Work”).
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