The Shipwright

By Melvin B. Tolson 1898–1966

Down in the shipyard, day and night,

The Galahads of the dock,

Hard as the sinews of basin rock,

Build an ocean cosmopolite.

The rivets stab and the hammers bite

Into the beams and plates of steel

Of the Diesel heart and the belly keel.

We,

The workers of the world strike catholic notes

On woods and irons, wring from brassy throats

Epics of industry.

Day and night

The diapason puts

The bent-winged gulls to flight

And shakes the harbor and quakes the ground

And leaps at the suns like Prometheus bound.

Our matrix shapes our citizen of the world

To cross the churning mountains of the sea,

Nor fashions a canoe to sail a lake

In cool felicity.

Melvin Tolson, "The Shipwright" from Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1999)

Source: "Harlem Gallery" and other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson (University Press of Virginia, 1999)

Biography

Known for his complex, challenging poetry, Melvin B. Tolson earned little critical attention throughout most of his life, but he eventually won a place among America's leading black poets. He was, in the opinion of Allen Tate, author of the preface to Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, the first black poet to assimilate "completely the full poetic language of his time and, by implication, the language of the . . .

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