"Bolder Measures Crashing Through": Margaret Walker's Poem of The Century

Abstract

I want to write, begins the speaker. The half-line, haunting, measures the cadence of another famous line, answers that even as a new sound, another mode, begins a recitation declaring desire and vocation. Tutored, compelling, the recitation, like that of a valediction at commencement, wins its audience through its elocution of the strategies of delight. For as the opening alliterative half-line enjoins the incremental statement of the second, a crescendo of images plays the recitation in cadences of song. More like a psalm than a sonnet, the music of the poem sings a dawn song, the mutima of a young and strong and lovely-hearing-sounding voice of a new painterpoet: