The Corn-Stalk Fiddle

When the corn’s all cut and the bright stalks shine
Like the burnished spears of a field of gold;
When the field-mice rich on the nubbins dine,
And the frost comes white and the wind blows cold;
Then its heigho fellows and hi-diddle-diddle,
For the time is ripe for the corn-stalk fiddle.

And you take a stalk that is straight and long,
With an expert eye to its worthy points,
And you think of the bubbling strains of song
That are bound between its pithy joints –
Then you cut out strings, with a bridge in the middle,
With a corn-stalk bow for a corn-stalk fiddle.

Then the strains that grow as you draw the bow
O’er the yielding strings with a practiced hand!
And the music’s flow never loud but low
Is the concert note of a fairy band.
Oh, your dainty songs are a misty riddle
To the simple sweets of the corn-stalk fiddle.

When the eve comes on and our work is done
And the sun drops down with a tender glance,
With their hearts all prime for the harmless fun,
Come the neighbor girls for the evening’s dance,
And they wait for the well-known twist and twiddle,
More time than tune – from the corn-stalk fiddle.

Then brother Jabez takes the bow,
While Ned stands off with Susan Bland,
Then Henry stops by Milly Snow
And John takes Nellie Jones’s hand,
While I pair off with Mandy Biddle,
And scrape, scrape, scrape goes the corn-stalk fiddle.

“Salute your partners,” comes the call,
“All join hands and circle round,”
“Grand train back,” and “Balance all,”
Footsteps lightly spurn the ground,
“Take your lady and balance down the middle”
To the merry strains of the corn-stalk fiddle.

So the night goes on and the dance is o’er,
And the merry girls are homeward gone,
But I see it all in my sleep once more,
And I dream till the very break of dawn
Of an impish dance on a red-hot griddle
To the screech and scrape of a corn-stalk fiddle.

This week we revisit the work of one of the great black American writers, Paul Laurence Dunbar. Poet, novelist and playwright, Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872, to ex-slaves freed after the civil war. His mother struggled hard to finance his early years at school, and, the only African American in his high school, Dunbar was an outstanding student.

Though subsequently his routes to higher education and solid employment were obstructed by poverty and prejudice, Dunbar found early fame as a poet, and an enthusiastic readership. But the success had a bitter edge for him, and he complained to his friend, James Weldon Johnson: “I’ve got to write dialect poetry, It is the only way I can get them to listen to me.”

Dunbar thought his poetry fell into two categories – the “major” poetry in standard English, underestimated by his readers, and the “minor” dialect poems. His frustration is understandable, but that labelling shouldn’t distract contemporary readers from the quality and importance of his dialect writing. Dunbar is a pioneer in this respect. If we were to trace the story of dialect in anglophone literature from his period to the present day, we’d see how vital a part it has played in revitalising and energising the language of poetry. The use of the vernacular has helped shape many of our current criteria for strong, memorable writing.

As well as the poetic writer and the dialect speaker, there is a third voice in Dunbar, in which the “plantation idiom”, as early commentators called it, is ploughed back into verse written primarily in standard English. The Corn-Stalk Fiddle is a terrific example. The idiom is rich and varied. It’s not only that of the celebrating field hands. Dunbar uses the language of the dance call with great effect in his penultimate stanza. Throughout, the vernacular and poetic pair up and give energy and succinctness to this brilliantly realised square dance of a poem.

Especially effective is the vividly detailed account of the building of the corn-stalk fiddle. I wasn’t aware such fiddles existed, and, at a first reading, I wondered if that was an underlying message of the poem: for the celebrants, there was access to joy only through fantasy. This thought hovers in the third stanza, perhaps: “And the music’s flow never loud but low / Is the concert note of a fairy band.”

But the poem makes clear that the fiddle is a real, carefully made musical instrument. The solo work and the collective, communal activity are seamlessly brought together. But again, at the end, when sleep blurs the speaker’s happy memories into dreams, the note becomes less than earthbound. In fact, those dreams are a touch demonic: “And I dream till the very break of dawn / Of an impish dance on a red-hot griddle / To the screech and scrape of a corn-stalk fiddle.” We may imagine this refers to the punishment for pleasure sometimes believed to await us in the afterlife – though Dunbar wasn’t a conventionally religious poet. More likely, it’s a glance towards the hell on Earth endured most of the time by the plantation workers.

• Smart Devices: 52 Poems from the Guardian Poem of the Week, edited by Carol Rumens, is published by Carcanet. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com