Bronze: A Book of Verses

Georgia Douglas Johnson · 1922

The book holds 65 poems in nine named sections, pages 15–101. The printed contents lists 59; six poems are headed and folioed in the body with no contents entry — Desire (p. 24), Prejudice (p. 29), Laocoön (pp. 30–31), Aliens (p. 37), Concord (p. 38) and Hope (p. 56) — and all six are in this book. 63 were assigned from the witness. The other two, Let Me Not Lose My Dream at page 21 and Hegira at pages 33–34, were placed by hand, because the witness shows them and the scorer could not: their lines run to about a hundred characters and the scan breaks every one of them across two lines. What the witness does show is the whole of each poem: LET ME NOT LOSE MY DREAM stands between the section heading Supplication and the folio for page 21, and HEGIRA stands between the folios for pages 32 and 33, with the verse following in order, and the contents lists both. The threshold was not lowered. Only membership is by hand; tools/books.py order placed both from the same witness. Peace in this book (page 71, the corpus's Peace-2, beginning "Peace on a thousand hills and dales") is not the Peace already placed in The Heart of a Woman (page 9, beginning "I rest me deep within the wood"). They share a title and are different poems; body evidence placed each. Prejudice (page 29, "These fell miasmic rings of mist") and Promise (page 54, "Through the moil and the gloom they have issued") are the volume poems; the corpus's Prejudice-2 and Promise-2 did not match this witness and stay unplaced. The heading over page 98 reads TERRELL; the corpus title is Turrell. Mary Church Terrell is the person addressed. Commitment 4 preserves a compositor's error, so what matters is which document has it; on this evidence it is not the printed page. Recorded, not resolved. The poem was assigned from its opening line. Laocoön is the only accented title she has; both this text layer and the 1918 one give LAOCOON. The order was derived from the body of the book and not from its contents pages, which is where the poems' own headings are; the range in order.source is that body, beginning after the last contents entry. Five poems came out of that with no position, because their headings wrap or the printed spelling differs from the corpus title, so the title as a single witness line was not found: "One of the Least of These, My Little One" (heading split after THESE,), To Atlanta University—Its Founders and Teachers (split after UNIVERSITY), To Emilie Bigelow Hapgood—Philanthropist (split after the dash), To Mary Church Turrell—Lecturer (printed TERRELL), and To Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Upon Hearing His (split after UPON). The contents pages put them at 44, 101, 96, 98 and 95. That was not written into the order, which records only what the two derivations agreed on.