Violets and Other Stories by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

I'm listening to Piano solo music by Manuel de Falla.  I'm not providing a link because I now realize how impermanent they can be.  But feel free to google in his name and "piano solos" and you'll find a link somewhere to listen to it.  

I thought for the week that holds Valentine's Day it would be appropriate to  review some poetry.

I read the following book on my Kindle:


Violets and Other Tales by Alice Dunbar-Nelson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was a book of poetry and short stories. It is not a hundred pages long. I liked the poetry better than the stories because the latter carried a tragical, Victorian-esque style.


What I did like was the vivid descriptions of New Orleans. It gives the reader a rich taste of the Creole and Anglo-French culture.

What I especially appreciate is that this book is not self-consciously ethnic or gender specific. I did not know the writer was black when I read these stories. I did not even know it was a woman who wrote them.

All I knew was that a brilliant writer wrote them.


Here is the poem of the title:


I had not thought of violets late,

The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet

In wistful April days, when lovers mate

And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.

The thought of violets meant florists' shops,

And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;

And garish lights, and mincing little fops

And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines.

So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,

I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams;

The perfect loveliness that God has made,—

Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.

And now—unwittingly, you've made me dream

Of violets, and my soul's forgotten gleam.


Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson (July 19, 1875 - September 18, 1935) was an American poet, journalist and political activist. Among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War, she was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the artistic flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. Her first husband was the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; she then married physician Henry A. Callis; and last married Robert J. Nelson, a poet and civil rights activist. From Poem Hunter.

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