The Eyes Of My Regret, poetry by Angelina Weld Grimké

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Angelina Weld Grimké (February 27, 1880 – June 10, 1958) was an African-American poet, journalist, teacher and playwright. She was a well-known poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Grimké was one of the first African-American women to have a play publicly performed. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1880 to a biracial family. Her father, Archibald Grimké, was a lawyer, the second African American to have graduated from Harvard Law School. Her mother, Sarah Stanley, was a European American from a Midwestern middle-class family. When Archibald Grimké and Sarah Stanley married, they faced strong opposition from her family, due to concerns over race. The marriage did not last very long.

Not long after Angelina's birth, Sarah left Archibald and returned with the infant to the Midwest. After Sarah began a career of her own, she sent Angelina, at the age of seven, back to live with her father in Massachusetts. Angelina Grimké would have little to no contact with her mother after that. Sarah Stanley committed suicide several years later.

Grimké wrote essays, short stories and poems which were published in The Crisis, the newspaper of the NAACP, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois; and Opportunity. They were also collected in anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance: The New Negro, Caroling Dusk, and Negro Poets and Their Poems. Her more well-known poems include "The Eyes of My Regret", "At April", "Trees" and "The Closing Door". In several poems and in her diaries Grimké expressed the frustration that her lesbianism createdSome of her unpublished poems are more explicitly lesbian, implying that she lived a life of suppression, "both personal and creative. As we continue to celebrate National Poetry Month, we present The Eyes Of My Regret, a well-known poem, by Angelina Weld Grimké.

The Eyes Of My Regret

By Angelina Weld Grimké 

Always at dusk, the same tearless experience,

The same dragging of feet up the same well-worn path

To the same well-worn rock;

The same crimson or gold dropping away of the sun

The same tints, – rose, saffron, violet, lavender, grey

Meeting, mingling, mixing mistily;

Before me the same blue black cedar rising jaggedly to 

a point;

Over it, the same slow unlidding of twin stars,

Two eyes, unfathomable, soul-searing,

Watching, watching, watching me;

The same two eyes that draw me forth, against my will

dusk after dusk;

The same two eyes that keep me sitting late into the

night, chin on knees

Keep me there lonely, rigid, tearless, numbly

miserable –

The eyes of my Regret.