poem, “An Evening Thought,” bears the date of 1760, preceding therefore any poem by Phillis Wheatley, his contemporary, by nine years. Following the title of the poem this information is given: “Composed by Jupiter Hammon, a Negro belonging to Mr. Lloyd, of Queen’s Village, on Long Island, the 25th of December, 1760.” With this poem of eighty-eight rhyming lines, printed on a double-column broadside, entered the American Negro into American literature. For that reason alone, were his stanzas inferior to what they are, I should include some of them in this anthology. But the truth is that, as “religious” poetry goes, or went in the eighteenth century—and Hammon’s poetry is all religious—this Negro slave may hold up his head in almost any company.
Nevertheless, the reader must not expect poetry in the typical stanzas I shall quote, but just some remarkable rhyming for an African slave, untaught and without precedent. “An Evening Thought” runs in such stanzas as the following:
Dear Jesus give thy Spirit now,
Thy Grace to every Nation,
That han’t the Lord to whom we bow,
The Author of Salvation.
From “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley, Ethiopian Poetess,” I take the following as a representative stanza:
