Slow through the Dark

Slow moves the pageant of a climbing race;
   Their footsteps drag far, far below the height,
   And, unprevailing by their utmost might,
Seem faltering downward from each hard won place.
No strange, swift-sprung exception we; we trace
   A devious way thro’ dim, uncertain light,—
   Our hope, through the long vistaed years, a sight
Of that our Captain’s soul sees face to face.

   Who, faithless, faltering that the road is steep,
Now raiseth up his drear insistent cry?
   Who stoppeth here to spend a while in sleep
Or curseth that the storm obscures the sky?
   Heed not the darkness round you, dull and deep;
The clouds grow thickest when the summit’s nigh.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 26, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“Slow through the Dark” first appeared in The New England Magazine vol. 23, no. 2 (October, 1900), and later in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s collection Lyrics of Love and Laughter (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903). In The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays (University of Iowa Press, 2023), poet Dora Malech and scholar Laura T. Smith write that Dunbar “used the gravity of the traditional sonnet (as in this Petrarchan sonnet’s call to fortitude) to intentionally ‘balance’ his famous dialect poems.”