“Ah, I know what happiness is...!” bursts from the page with a confidence that the rest of Blanche Taylor Dickinson’s lyric quietly undermines. Dickinson, a Kentucky-born African American poet and journalist associated with the Harlem Renaissance, published this piece as “Poem” in Countee Cullen’s influential 1927 anthology *Caroling Dusk*. Her presence there places her among the Black writers reshaping American literature in the early twentieth century, though her subject here is less public struggle than private emotion. The poem’s intimate, wondering tone shows another side of the movement: a space where joy could be examined as fragile and fleeting.
At its center lies a paradox. The speaker insists she knows happiness, yet everything she knows about it involves losing it. Happiness appears first as “a timid little fawn / Creeping softly up to me / For one caress, then gone.” The fawn is gentle, wild, and easily startled; it approaches only on its own terms and vanishes before the speaker can finish the encounter. Happiness, Dickinson suggests, is real but not possessable. The poem’s second image is even more transient: dawn wearing “a shining dew decked diadem.” That crown of dew is beautiful because it will soon evaporate. Calling it “an aftermath of tears” complicates the picture further—dawn’s brightness rises from leftover weeping, as if joy is inseparable from sorrow. The paired emblems, “fawn and dawn,” share more than rhyme; both are delicate beginnings that cannot be held beyond their moment. By the final lines, the speaker has accepted the pattern: “And always they will slip away / Into the brush of another day.”
The form mirrors that slipping. Fourteen lines gesture toward a sonnet, but the poem never settles into a strict rhyme scheme. Soft off-rhymes such as “fawn,” “gone,” and “dawn,” then later “wears,” “tears,” and “years,” echo without locking shut. The ellipses after “happiness is...!” and “through with it...” open small silences, as though the feeling escapes in the gaps between words. The rhythm shifts from an eager exclamation to shorter, almost breathless observations, much like someone trying not to scare a wild animal. Words such as “timid,” “creeping,” “caress,” and “slip” keep the tone tender and alert. Even the dawn is personified as something that “wears” its crown rather than owns it, reinforcing how temporary the adornment is.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to turn happiness into a reward or a permanent state. Dickinson treats it as a visitation—brief, luminous, and inseparable from loss. Her speaker has “played with them for years,” suggesting both tenderness and long experience with disappointment, yet she still names these fleeting moments as joy. In a literary period often remembered for its bold declarations and social urgency, this quiet meditation adds a necessary inwardness. It asks readers to recognize happiness not by grasping it, but by paying close enough attention to see it before it bolts, before the dew dries, before another day begins.