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image 11 (p.271)

The Crisis:
A Record of the Darker Races
Vol. 13, No. 6: Easter Number
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt (editor)
New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1917-04

Otto Leland Bohanan wrote the The Dawn's Awake, the first poem featured on page 274. This piece takes place in the East, where the soldier describes the war in a romantic light. "The dawn of a thousand dreams and thrills. and music singing in the hills..."  the soldier seems to be going into to battle for the first time, as "The boon of light we craved, awaited long, has come, has come!"

The second poem, by Leslie Pinckney Hill, In the Still Night is similar to the  first poem in that it is still expressed in romanticism,   even as the soldier is dying. He depicts an angel coming while everything around him becomes background noise. "The moil of the living shuts away. Then can the soul her fountains fill, while all the universe is still..."

Both poems are very short, and by being placed side by side, it allows the reader to think that the soldiers in the poems might be one and the same. The poems together seem to complete the soldiers’ life in battle; his optimistic cheer in going into battle, and his sad, yet beautiful slipping of reality.Both works are similar to the famous WWI poems of the English soldiers, Rupert Brooke and Seeger whose work shows the valor of the soldier in battle.  Both poems were done by black poets; they are great, yet until recently were relatively obscure.  Unfortunately, that was the fate of many black artists; their work was unknown outside of their own milieu