The Poetry Woodland Series: "Nothing And Something"

Public domain poetry readings & analysis. Vol. 2 | Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's poems 🪶

Nothing And Something*

by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

It is nothing to me, the beauty said,
With a careless toss of her pretty head;
The man is weak if he can't refrain
From the cup you say is fraught with pain.
It was something to her in after years,
When her eyes were drenched with burning tears,
And she watched in lonely grief and dread,
And startled to hear a staggering tread.

It is nothing to me, the mother said;
I have no fear that my boy will tread
In the downward path of sin and shame,
And crush my heart and darken his name.
It was something to her when that only son
From the path of right was early won,
And madly cast in the flowing bowl
A ruined body and sin-wrecked soul.

It is nothing to me, the young man cried:
In his eye was a flash of scorn and pride;
I heed not the dreadful things ye tell:
I can rule myself I know full well.
It was something to him when in prison he lay
The victim of drink, life ebbing away;
And thought of his wretched child and wife,
And the mournful wreck of his wasted life.

It is nothing to me, the merchant said,
As over his ledger he bent his head;
I'm busy to-day with tare and tret,
And I have no time to fume and fret.
It was something to him when over the wire
A message came from a funeral pyre -
A drunken conductor had wrecked a train,
And his wife and child were among the slain.

It is nothing to me, the voter said,
The party's loss is my greatest dread;
Then gave his vote for the liquor trade,
Though hearts were crushed and drunkards made.
It was something to him in after life,
When his daughter became a drunkard's wife
And her hungry children cried for bread,
And trembled to hear their father's tread.

Is it nothing for us to idly sleep
While the cohorts of death their vigils keep?
To gather the young and thoughtless in,
And grind in our midst a grist of sin?
It is something, yes, all, for us to stand
Clasping by faith our Saviour's hand;
To learn to labor, live and fight
On the side of God and changeless light.

*This poem is in the public domain!

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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 - February 22, 1911) was a poet, journalist, teacher, activist, and fiction writer born free in Baltimore. Frequently thought of as the mother of Black journalism in the US, she wrote for many anti-slavery and abolitionist newspapers and published several books and collections. This blurb hardly scratches the surface, so please read more about her incredible work and life here and here.

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What stood out to me about this poem is that it reads like a recipe failed over and over again, repeating how we reason with our choice to ignore and look away (close our eyes & sleep through what we feel doesn’t concern or affect us).

It’s nothing to us until it impacts us.

Starkly, I think of the racialized impact of COVID-19 as one of too many examples.

In the poem, among many crisp cases, there’s even distance from the young man (stanza three) in the assumption that youth are either ‘sinners’ or more tempted to be so. Ending the poem with voting spotlights its power’s timelessness, and reminds me of this incredible video of Brittany Packnett Cunningham. Standing up is hard work, yes, but nothing changes if we don’t. And even if change could happen in a hypothetical vacuum, we’d still be in it. No matter what.

Further, throughout the poem there is the idea that coping mechanisms (alcohol, most frequently here) are societally-deemed ‘sin’ and moral failure, bearing the burden of these labels. I think of the line in Beloved by Toni Morrison, “Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.”

This emphasizes how readily people are characterized as immoral if they’re unable to ‘use alcohol to cope properly or with etiquette so as not to stain the status quo.’ When people wrestle with substances, it’s disturbing how easily we cast them under the shade of ‘immoral’ or ‘sinful’ as if their struggles were an innate and fated personal choice rather than a survival of the world in which they live (multiple truths coexist rather than minimize: alcohol addictions are, of course, deeply harmful). This was and is especially true for Black people (and other POC) and it’s a violent way to evade empathy.

To reply to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, it’s not “nothing for us to idly sleep / While the cohorts of death their vigils keep” because we’re never removed or separated from anything. As Audre Lorde says, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” You could easily substitute the word ‘person’ for ‘issue’ in this sentence.