Textual History

This poem also appears in The Liberator (March, 1921): [*] Claude McKay The Easter Flower The Liberator (March, 1921): 6 .

Notes

  • Highlight Variants ?

References to Poem ?

Formats

The Easter Flower

  1. Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly

  2. My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,

  3. Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily

  4. Soft-scented in the air for yards around;

  5. Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!

  6. Just like a fragile bell of silver rime rhyme* ,

  7. It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief

  8. In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;

  9. And many thought it was a sacred sign,

  10. And some called it the resurrection flower;

  11. And I, a pagan, worshiped worshipped* at its shrine,

  12. Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.

Contents:

Harlem Shadows (1922)

Additional Poems by Claude McKay

Contemporary Reviews

Supplementary Texts