Arna Bontemps, born in Louisiana in 1902, became one of the quieter yet most durable writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He moved between teaching, librarianship, and poetry, often drawing on Black folk traditions, spirituals, and the textures of Southern labor. “Close Your Eyes!” appeared in the late 1920s, during a period when Black writers were insisting that ordinary Black life—its grief, its dignity, its endurance—deserved lyric treatment. The poem addresses a woodman and tells him to stop his work and enter death with closed eyes.
The central idea is that death can be an act of courage rather than defeat, especially for a laborer whose life has been shaped by toil. The speaker’s commands are gentle but firm: “Drop the axe and leave the timber where it lies.” The woodman is told to stand erect and let his black face front the west. The word black anchors the poem in a racial world; this is not just any laborer but a Black man in early twentieth-century America, whose life may have been marked by exploitation or violence. Facing the west—the direction of sunset and endings—he is not bowed. He meets the final passage upright. The poem turns death into a well-earned rest.
Bontemps uses two quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme, and the short lines carry a ritual hush. In the first stanza, the hard, plain images—axe, timber, hill—root the poem in physical work. The rhyme of west and rest is quietly meaningful: the direction of the setting sun becomes synonymous with sleep. The speaker’s voice is direct, even stern, but not cold. “A woodman on the hill must have his rest” sounds like a proverb or a line from a spiritual, giving the individual death a larger, almost communal shape.
The second stanza moves from work to love. “Go where leaves are lying brown and wet” evokes autumn and the damp earth, but also the body’s return to the ground. The hardest command is to forget the mother’s “warm arms and her breast who mothered you.” That image is intensely physical, the first human comfort, and the speaker does not pretend it is easy. The repetition of forget in the next line—“And every face you ever loved forget”—widens the demand to all affection. Yet the final line returns to the opening command: “Close your eyes; walk bravely through.” The word bravely does the crucial work. Dying is not passive here; it is something one chooses and performs with dignity.
The poem’s significance lies in its restraint. Bontemps never names a lynching, an illness, or an accident, but the black face and exhausted labor hover over the lines, allowing the poem to mourn a whole history of Black suffering without turning the woodman into a mere victim. The tone is neither angry nor sentimental; it is closer to a lullaby that also expects courage. That balance is characteristic of Bontemps, who found strength in ordinary Black life and folk speech. In the Harlem Renaissance, “Close Your Eyes!” showed that a short lyric could hold the cadence of a spiritual and the edge of modern racial consciousness at the same time. Its final line lingers like a blessing and a challenge.