Tags

, , , , , , ,

Welcome to Prosery Monday, my friends, where we will attempt to write a piece of prose fiction (144-words or less) using a given line of poetry! I’m your host, Dora, and the poet from whose work I’ve chosen is Paul Laurence Dunbar.

press.princeton.edu

The Poet

Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872 to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the Civil War. He was a prominent writer in the 1890’s, known internationally for his dialect poems. Later, he proved to be an important influence on Black writers like Ralph Ellison, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou. In fact, the title of Angelou’s first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, comes from Dunbar’s poem, “Sympathy.” Dunbar wrote the poem at the age of twenty-seven and died six years later of tuberculosis after having written an impressive literary body of work (novels, short stories, essays, and many poems) representing Black life in the turn-of-the-century United States.

The Poem

“Sympathy” was written while working as a clerk at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Here the tubercular Dunbar felt “like he was trapped in a cage“ and “the dust and must of books in a hot, closed space” strained his already dwindling health (Library of Congress Blogs).

Frederick Carl Frieseke (American, 1874 – 1939), The Bird Cage, c. 1910, oil on canvas – New Britain Museum of American Art

The Line

I’ve chosen this line from “Sympathy” for you to use creatively in your fictional composition:

And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—

Your challenge? Write a piece of prose (not poetry) of no more than 144 words that includes the above given line. You may change it with breaks or punctuation, without altering the order of the words.

When you have written your prose, publish it on your blog with a link to this dVerse post. Then insert the link to your post in Mr. Linky below. Finally, please do check out the other stories and leave a comment. Enjoy!