Dunbar’s poem “Douglass,” from his 1903 collection, Lyrics of Love and Laughter, is an apostrophe to African American leader Frederick Douglass, whom Dunbar met in 1893 while promoting his first collection of poetry, Oak and Ivy. Douglass admired Dunbar’s work and hired him to manage the Haitian exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Ah, Douglass, we have fall’n on evil days,

Such days as thou, not even thou didst know,

When thee, the eyes of that harsh long ago

Saw, salient, at the cross of devious ways,

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And all the country heard thee with amaze.

Not ended then, the passionate ebb and flow,

The awful tide that battled to and fro;

We ride amid a tempest of dispraise.

Now, when the waves of swift dissension swarm,

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And Honor, the strong pilot, lieth stark,

Oh, for thy voice high-sounding o’er the storm,

For thy strong arm to guide the shivering bark,

The blast-defying power of thy form,

To give us comfort through the lonely dark.

(1903)