Published in his first collection of poetry, Chants d’ombre (Songs of Darkness or Shadow Songs), “Letter to a Poet” is a short praise poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor to Martinican poet and statesman Aimé Césaire, to whom the piece is dedicated and directly addressed, and with whom Senghor (along with Léon Damas) founded the Negritude movement.

While the poem celebrates the insight of Césaire and the friendship of the two authors, it simultaneously celebrates facets of Negritude thought that they shared and, like other poems in Chants, transcends its specific subject through its depiction of Césaire within its discourse on Negritude.

“Letter to a Poet” is divided into three stanzas. In the first, Senghor uses “Black sea gulls” (Stanza 1, l. 2) as his primary metaphor and uses imagery that both conveys a transatlantic linkage across the Black diaspora and applauds the revolutionary ideology of Césaire, who had been elected to office in Martinique in 1944.

The black gulls have brought the speaker “tidings” from Césaire, “mixed with spices . . . of the Islands” (3–4). This special species of gulls—which are generally not black (though some species do have black wings or wing tips)—travels across oceans. Here, the unusual imagery implies a broader racial community.

The gulls show Césaire’s “influence” and “distinguished brow” (l. 4) and are now his “disciples . . . proud as peacocks” (l. 5), suggesting the global significance of both Césaire’s political thought and the Negritude movement itself, as well as the realization of the Black pride it sought to inspire. Césaire “keep[s] their . . . zeal / From fading” through, the poem suggests, his “wake of light” (l. 8), or enlightenment.

The second stanza contrasts images of nobility and the working class and compares the persona’s memory of his friend with racial memory of ancestors. Césaire is seen to have “praised the Ancestors and the legitimate princes” (2.15), to have his own “nobility” even while he, in the speaker’s memory, “recline[s] royally . . . on a cushion of clear hillside” (2.11), a reference to the imagery used by the speaker in Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939).

Such intertextual references indicate that the homage being paid to Césaire is simultaneously a celebration of Negritude thought. In addition, however, the praise of (Black) ancestry celebrated in the Negritude movement is here both practiced by the poem and identified as a strength of the person being praised: for his “rhyme and counterpoint” (2.16), he received the wages of poor men and the “amber hearts and soul-wrenching dance” of women.

Imagery in the second stanza—much of which alludes to Notebook of a Return and to homage paid with a sacrifice of food or libation—thus champions Negritude thought even as it honors Césaire as its proponent.

In the short third stanza, the speaker longs for his friend’s return, predicts it, and uses a “mahogany tree”—and the implication that it be carved, for example, as a mask—to conclude his celebration of Césaire.

While “Letter to a Poet” may be criticized for traces of male-centered language—e.g., “bluntly fraternal greetings!” (l. 1), the spreading of Negritude thought through male “gulls like . . . boatmen” (l. 2), and the praise of Césaire through “the many plum-skin women in the harem of [his] mind” (l. 9)—such a critique does not diminish the Negritude ideals expressed by the poem.

Bibliography
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. The Collected Poetry. Translated by Melvin Dixon. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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