"A Brown Study": Sterling Brown's Legacy of Compassionate Connections

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Struggling to write about Sterling Brown, his poetry and criticism, at first I could utter only half-remembered, half-invented fragments from the many conversations we had during the fifteen years I knew him and was his friend. Hearing Sterling’s voice so tinged with sorrow songs and trainwhistle blues, I thought of William Butler Yeats, whom Sterling loved for his music and his discovery and 20th century redirection of Irish folklore, and whose shivering, sinewy voice Sterling had heard on a recording from the 1930s. Some lines came into my head, and like the folks who drop in unexpextedly in Sterling’s poems, they lingered on the front porch of my mind:

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain. I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

So Yeats wrote of his writer’s travail of old age in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” before he realized that his theme was the heart. And not the heart of sentimental Valentine’s Day metaphors but the funky “foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

Ah, I thought, Sterling Brown’s true journey, like Yeats’s, was to the interior of his people and their tradition. There he found himself, and there he rooted his modernist poetry of the folk.

Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all.

These lines are from Yeats’s epitaph, “Under Ben Bulben.” And as epitaph to Sterling Brown in the tenth year since his passing, I decided to write up the talk I gave on his 80th birthday at a festival put together by Michael Harper—the “Providence conductor” Fanny Ellison was fond of calling this poetic son of Sterling—at Brown University on May 1st, 1981. “Sterling Brown and the Irish Connection” was the name I gave it. And I wasn’t talking about Irish Americans, for like several African-American writers the connection Sterling made was back to Ireland. (Not to the black Irish either, though he knew the phrase did not refer only to the black-haired, dark-eyed Irish, or to the melancoly, bitter brooding associated with a certain Irish temperament but also to the fact that from the time of the Spanish Armada stretching back before the Danish invasions, Moors had sailed to and been shipwrecked along the coasts of Ireland, especially off County Kerry in the Southwest where the Gulf Stream blows a warm plume of air past incongruous, thriving palm trees. Some of these Moors stayed behind and intermarried with Irish women.) Like Frederick Douglass before him, Sterling Brown found affinity with the soulful, stoical quality of Irish expression. When Douglass sought a point of contact with African-American slave songs, he found it in Irish music. “Nowhere,” he wrote in his old age, “outside of dear old Ireland, in the days of want and famine, have I heard sounds so mournful.”

And surely Brown’s stubborn refusal over the years to accept the Harlem Renaissance as a name for the burst of energy in African-American letters during the 1920s and early 1930s had strong reference to the Irish tradition. Who would have thought to call the Irish Revival the Dublin Renaissance? Who but Joyce perhaps, and he was off enjoying his self-generated exile in Paris and Zurich. No, the roots Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge put down after sojourns in London and Paris, were in the folk country of the west, from the desolate moonscapeCounty Clare, to the suuden wild, green, fog-and-wind-obscured, sea-roaring Cliffs of Moher, up to Galway with its bleak, off-shore Aran Islands and their curraghs, north past Sligo to Ben Bulben, as much a mythical creature of Irish folklore as it is a mere mountain, finally to Donegal in the North and the likes of Bloody Head frothing away at the edge of the sea. One of Yeats’s most moving observations appears on the wall leading up the winding stair to his tower, Thoor Ballylee. There, on a...