Gwendolyn B. Bennett, a poet and visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, published “Sonnet--2” in The Crisis, the NAACP magazine edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, in 1923. The sonnet reads like an intimate inventory of what the speaker finds beautiful—rain-washed flowers, shifting sea patterns, crocuses after snow—but its real destination is far more personal. By the final couplet, Bennett has taught the reader to rank her loves, only to show that human feeling outranks them all.
The inventory begins with visual and tactile beauty. The speaker names “flowers bathed by rain,” “patterns traced upon the sea,” and “crocuses where snow has lain,” before lingering over the “iridescence of a gem” and “the moon’s cool opalescent light.” These are not static emblems; each image shimmers or holds traces of weather, snow, or changing light. The second quatrain shifts to scent: azaleas “and the scent of them, / And honeysuckles in the night.” The repeated “and” creates a sense of abundance, as if the list could continue forever. From sight and smell, the poem moves to sound. Winds “sing among the trees,” crickets call “from the weir,” and then the speaker names “Negroes humming melodies.” That line, reflecting the vocabulary of its era, is historically significant because Bennett places African American music naturally alongside wind and crickets, refusing to treat Black expression as marginal or merely decorative.
The poem’s form supports this movement from outer beauty to inner feeling. “Sonnet--2” follows the skeleton of a Shakespearean sonnet, with three quatrains and a closing couplet; its rhymes mostly alternate, though Bennett allows herself a freer, softer pairing in the third quatrain. The lines are short and conversational, often hovering around seven or eight syllables rather than strict iambic pentameter, so the poem feels less like a stiff Elizabethan exercise than like an affectionate note. The key word “dear” appears at the beginning of the first and third quatrains and again in the final couplet, acting as a refrain that raises the stakes each time. What is “dear” expands from flowers and gems to sounds and songs, until the speaker can surprise us with a deeper kind of value.
That deeper value arrives in the closing couplet: “But dearer far than all surmise / Are sudden tear-drops in your eyes.” The word “surmise” suggests guesswork or imagination, so even the speaker’s ability to picture beauty cannot compete with the real, unplanned vulnerability of another person’s tears. The suddenness matters: rain and moonlight and music can be admired from a distance, but tears demand intimacy. This turn makes “Sonnet--2” more than a lovely catalog. It is a love poem that argues emotional truth and human connection are the dearest things of all, and it demonstrates how the Harlem Renaissance could wrap both cultural pride and private tenderness inside a traditional form.