Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966), an African American poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance, published “Romance” in her first collection, The Heart of a Woman (1918). Johnson later hosted a famous Washington, D.C. salon for Black writers and intellectuals, and her early lyrics often explore the interior lives of women—longing, love, and loss. “Romance” belongs to that world of intimate feeling. Set beside the racial themes that would emerge in her 1922 collection Bronze, it shows how a Black woman poet could treat personal emotion as a serious literary subject.
The poem follows the speaker through three stages of life. In youth she is certain: “Romance will come riding by,” and she will “surely smile / And play with him awhile.” The verb “play” and the word “awhile” make Romance sound like a delightful but temporary playmate, not a lifelong force. By middle age, the confidence falters. The word “will” becomes “may,” and the question mark after “I wonder shall I smile” turns the earlier statement into a doubt. The speaker no longer expects to greet Romance with open joy; she only wonders whether she would smile if he passed. In the final stanza, the shift is abrupt. “But now—” breaks the poem with a dash, and the archaic cry “Alas!” announces a lament. Romance still “ever will come by,” yet the speaker says she will “never smile,” because “He has been dead the while!”
That final turn is the central insight. The poem is not really about a failed relationship or a single lost lover. It is about the death of a capacity—the capacity to believe that joy could arrive in the shape of another person. Romance is personified as a horseman, a knight-like figure riding past on the road. The image suggests motion, chance, and the possibility of being chosen or ignored. In youth, the rider is expected; in middle age, he is uncertain; at the end, he is a ghost. The speaker realizes that while she was watching for him, the thing she hoped for was already gone. The repeated rhyme of “smile” with “awhile” in the first two stanzas keeps the tone light and songlike, as if the speaker is reciting a child’s rhyme. When “awhile” disappears in the final stanza and is replaced by the flatter phrase “the while,” the music hardens. “Never smile” and “dead the while” end the poem with a cold finality.
Johnson’s construction relies on repetition with small, devastating changes. The opening stanza’s “I used to say” becomes the second stanza’s “then I said” and finally the present “I only say.” The word “surely” gives way to “wonder” and then to “never.” These echoes make the poem feel like a memory being revised, as the speaker measures how far she has traveled from her younger self. The irregular, short lines and simple words give it the feel of speech, but the patterned repetitions and the closing rhyme pull it toward song. That tension between a childlike form and an adult grief is what makes the poem linger. It is significant because it uses very small means—fifteen lines, a horse-and-rider metaphor, a few repeated words—to trace a large emotional arc. Johnson turns the passing of youth into a quiet scene of recognition: the rider may still appear at the edge of the road, but the smile that once met him is gone.