Prophets for a New Day by Margaret Walker
"Prophets for a New Day" by Margaret Walker is a powerful poetic work that draws parallels between the struggles of the modern African American experience and biblical narratives. Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous 1960s in the United States, the poem invokes historical events such as the assassinations of influential leaders and the Vietnam War, while addressing the socio-political challenges faced by marginalized communities. The first section of the poem juxtaposes Old Testament figures with contemporary themes, suggesting an urgent call to action and hope amidst adversity.
Walker utilizes rich imagery and symbolic language to connect the plight of modern believers with their biblical predecessors, emphasizing themes of suffering, resilience, and prophecy. As the poem progresses, it explores the emergence of a prophetic voice that speaks to those enduring pain and oppression. However, it also introduces a menacing force, referred to as "the beast," which represents chaos and destruction, serving as a stark reminder of humanity's darker tendencies.
Ultimately, Walker's work presents a vision of potential transformation and liberation through an apocalyptic lens, urging remembrance and acknowledgment of the injustices faced by those who have suffered throughout history. "Prophets for a New Day" invites readers to reflect on the intersections of faith, struggle, and hope in the quest for freedom and justice.
On this Page
Prophets for a New Day by Margaret Walker
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1970 (collected in Prophets for a New Day, 1970)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
Prophets for a New Day reprises the heroic sacrifice of the revolutionary 1960’s in the United States, a decade which featured the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy, as well as the Watts riots and the American forces in Vietnam, where a disproportionate number of those who died were African American.
Stanza I appropriates the Old Testament personalities and narrative of the Hebrew captivity and ordeal in a modern discourse that is homiletic and exhortative. It announces the threshold of an apocalyptic time. The gravity of the proclamation is suggested by its association with the tropes of heroic Old Testament personalities—Moses and the burning bush, Isaiah’s lips purified with a hot coal, the portentous wheels of fire that accompanied Ezekiel’s dire prophesies, and Amos, who prophesied the fall of the Hebrew kingdom. Like the biblical audience, the modern African American one lives in poor places and jails, in the worthless lands and the roads between inns. A composite prophetic leader delivers a message to all who are tired and in pain because they are denied creature comforts and safety.
The second stanza connects the biblical and the modern population of believers who have no political power. They kneel by an iconic river and around the world. Prophecy is proclaimed, signaled by “flaming flags of stars,” “a blinding sun,” “the lamp of truth” that burns the “oil of devotion.” The prophet personalities—now no longer composite—chant the spell of an apocalyptic vision. Upon the prayerful throng of faces that are racially dark descends “the Word,” accompanied by an energy of freedom that is felt like the weather of a great storm coming.
However, in stanza III, the terrible means of deliverance is the biblical “beast,” reincarnated in modernity to destroy order and the rational as well as the creatures and landscape of the temporal world. The beast—a male, anthropomorphic personality of chaos, the sum of the extreme possibility of perversion of humankind—destroys everything, individually, genocidally, and ecologically. The beast is humanity run amok, a cannibal. War, Famine, Pestilence, Death, Destruction, and Trouble, unceasingly, day and night, eat humankind and its defenders. It is a coward whose genius is to know humanity’s cowardice, who slanders the possibility of freedom and virtue. Its lie is that the people who have died in the slavery that built modern civilization are not worth remembering, acknowledging, and repenting. Then the beast reenacts Calvary transmogrified and drives the people from the city to a new Golgatha, “to be stabbed” in a virtual forest of crucified people. Escape from the beast and deliverance will come with an apocalyptic ending of the world as it is.
Bibliography
Barksdale, Richard K. “Margaret Walker: Folk Orature and Historical Prophecy.” In Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960, edited by R. Baxter Miller. Tennessee Studies in Literature 30. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986.
Berke, Nancy. Women Poets on the Left: Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Margaret Walker. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.
Buckner, B. Dilla. “Folkloric Elements in Margaret Walker’s Poetry.” CLA Journal 33 (1990): 367-377.
Carmichael, Jacqueline Miller. Trumpeting a Fiery Sound: History and Folklore in Margaret Walker’s “Jubilee.” Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Graham, Maryemma, ed. Conversations with Margaret Walker. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002.
Graham, Maryemma, ed. Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Klotmas, Phyllis. “’Oh Freedom’—Women and History in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee.” Black American Literature Forum 11 (1977): 139-145.
Miller, R. Baxter. “The ’Intricate Design’ of Margaret Walker: Literary and Biblical Re-Creation in Southern History.” In Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960, edited by Miller. Tennessee Studies in Literature 30. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986.
Ward, Jerry W., Jr. “A Writer for Her People: An Interview with Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander.” Mississippi Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Fall, 1998): 515-527.