She is a nun, withdrawing behind her veil;
Grey, mysterious, meditative, unapproachable.
Her body is tawny with the eagerness of the Sun
And her eyes are pools which shine in deep canyons.
She is a beautiful swart woman
With opals at her throat,
Rubies at her wrists
And topaz about her ankles.
Her breasts are like the evening and the day stars.
She sits upon her throne of light, proud and silent,
Indifferent to wooers.
The Sun is her servitor, the stars her attendants,
Running before her.
She sings a song unto her own ears,
Solitary but sufficient;
The song of her being.
She is a naked dancer, dancing upon
A pavement of porphyry and pearl,
Dazzling, so that the eyes must be shaded.
She wears the stars upon her bosom
And braids her hair with the constellations.
_Irwin Russell_
Irwin Russell was born, June 3, 1853, at Port Gibson, Mississippi,
where he studied law and was admitted to the bar. His restless
nature and wayward disposition drove him from one place to another,
from dissipation to dissipation, from a not too rugged health to an
utter breakdown. In July, 1879, he was forced to leave New York,
working his way down to New Orleans on a coast steamer, trying to
rehabilitate himself as reporter on the New Orleans _Picayune_. But
illness pursued him and the following December Russell died, cut
off, in the midst of his promise, before he had reached his
twenty-seventh year.
Although Russell did not take his poetry seriously and though the
bulk of it is small, its influence has been large. Thomas Nelson
Page and Joel Chandler Harris have acknowledged their indebtedness
to him; the creator of Uncle Remus writing, “Irwin Russell was
among the first—if not the very first—of Southern writers to
appreciate the literary possibilities of the negro character.” He
entered their life, appreciated their fresh turns of thought, saw
things with that peculiar mixture of reverence and unconscious
humor that is so integral a part of negro songs and spirituals.
“Blessing the Dance” and “The Song of the Banjo” (from Russell’s
operetta _Christmas-Night in the Quarters_, possibly his best
known work) are excellent examples; faithful renderings of the
mind of the old-fashioned, simple and sententious child of the
plantation. In the latter poem the old story of Noah is told, with
delightful additions, from the colorful angle of the darky; local
in its setting, revealing in its quaint psychology.
A collection of his poems appeared, with an introduction by Joel
Chandler Harris, in 1888. In 1917, a more inclusive volume,
beautifully printed, with illustrations by E. W. Kemble, was
published by The Century Co.; it was entitled _Christmas-Night in
the Quarters_.
Russell died, in an obscure boarding house in New Orleans, December
23, 1879.