Read these stanzas from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems.
"The Poet and His Song"
A song is but a little thing,
And yet what joy it is to sing!
In hours of toil it gives me zest,
And when at eve I long for rest;
When cows come home along the bars,
And in the fold I hear the bell,
As Night, the shepherd, herds his stars,
I sing my song, and all is well.
"An Easy-Goin’ Feller"
Ther' ain't no use in all this strife,
An' hurryin', pell-mell, right thro' life.
I don't believe in goin' too fast
To see what kind o' road you've passed.
It ain't no mortal kind o' good,
'N' I would n't hurry ef I could.
I like to jest go joggin' 'long,
To limber up my soul with song.
How are the messages of these two poems similar?
A. Both poems suggest that music offers contentment in life.
B. Both poems indicate that people should travel for enjoyment.
C. Both poems prove that work should be a top priority.
D. Both poems insist that friends need to celebrate together.
Answers
Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of the most widely known- and probably one of the best- poets to write in dialect. My favorite poem of his is without qualification The Poet and His Song (a poem written in Standard English), yet every time I read one of his dialect poems (or any such poem for that matter) I’m always moved in a way that doesn’t happen with Standard English reads.
Both have their beauty, but poems in dialect seem to me to impart an apperception of culture that poems in grammatically correct English cannot. It is in this sense that I feel poems in dialect are prettier and more interesting. (Don't get me wrong, almost all of my favorite poems are in 'correct' syntax.)
I don’t know quite yet if I have a favorite dialect poem done by Dunbar, but I find this one below delightful (not to mention its message is good).