Jessie Redmon Fauset was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, though her name often appears more frequently as an editor and mentor than as a poet. As literary editor of *The Crisis*, she helped launch writers such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, yet her own verse deserves attention for its controlled, psychologically sharp lyrics. "Rencontre," with its French title meaning "meeting" or "encounter," belongs to the early twentieth-century flowering of African American poetry and draws on the compressed lyric tradition to explore an interior crisis rather than a public one.
At first glance, the poem records a single moment: seeing "you" last night makes the speaker's "passionless" heart leap high. But the leap does not bring simple joy. Instead, "the grief of years" surges within the speaker and whelms her with "endless rue." The meeting, the title suggests, should be romantic, even redemptive; Fauset turns it into the trigger for accumulated sorrow. The final lines sharpen that paradox. The heart had "slept so still, so spent"—numbness as a kind of survival—then "awoke last night,—to break anew!" The word "anew" is crucial: this is not a first wound but a repeated breaking, as if every renewal of feeling restores an old pain. The central idea is not that love is absent, but that feeling itself can be dangerous when the heart has already been exhausted by loss.
The poem's structure amplifies that emotional turn. Its six lines move in iambic tetrameter, a steady, song-like beat that gives the outbursts even more force when they come. The second, fourth, and sixth lines rhyme on "you," "rue," and "anew," a tight sonic link among the beloved, sorrow, and renewal. The rhythm is mostly calm until the exclamations break through: "when I saw you!" and "to break anew!" The dash before "to break anew" creates a held breath, a hesitation before the final rupture. The speaker's heart is personified as a sleeping creature—it "leapt," "slept," "awoke," and now must "break." These verbs turn the poem into a miniature drama of the body, while the word "whelmed" suggests drowning, as if the grief of years rises like water.
Fauset's word choices are spare but exact. "Passionless" is not empty but defended, a state of not feeling after too much feeling. "Surged" and "whelmed" give the grief an oceanic force. "Endless rue" sounds almost archaic, but that old-fashioned note gives the sorrow a long, formal history; the pain is not momentary but ancient and ongoing. The French title matters too: it elevates the chance meeting into a literary rencontre, a charged collision between past and present, between numbness and desire. The poem's significance lies in this compression. In just six lines, Fauset captures the double edge of reawakened emotion—that to feel again is also to risk breaking again. For readers, the poem is a reminder that the Harlem Renaissance was not only a movement of political statement and folk idiom; it also produced intimate lyrics that examine the fragile machinery of the human heart.