Lewis Alexander, an African American poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance, composed “Tanka I” in the 1920s while experimenting with Japanese verse forms. The tanka, a five-line poem of thirty-one syllables, gave Alexander a tight frame for compressed emotion. In adapting this form to English, he joined a broader modernist interest in Asian poetry, but he also made the form his own. The result is a quiet, disorienting lyric about fate, memory, and the price of standing above a lost path.
The poem opens with a wish: “Could I but retrace / The winding stairs fate built me.” Here the past is imagined as a staircase, but not one the speaker chose. Fate is the architect, and the route has been winding—full of turns, half-hidden, shaped by forces beyond control. The word “retrace” suggests a longing to return, to see the path clearly, perhaps to undo a mistake or recover an earlier self. The syllable pattern—five, seven, five, seven, seven—creates a wave-like rhythm, and the lack of rhyme keeps the voice plain and direct. That conversational movement lasts until the third line snaps the hope: “They fell from my feet.” The stairs collapse away from the speaker, and the way back disappears. This is the poem’s emotional turn. It does not explain why the stairs fell, which makes the loss feel both sudden and inevitable.
What remains is a strange vantage point: “Now I stand on the high round.” The word “high” suggests achievement or elevation, yet “round” is ambiguous—a circular platform, the top of a winding stair, or a runglike ledge spinning without clear edges. Standing there is not necessarily triumphant. It is more like being stranded above a void. The final line, “Down beneath height above depth--,” compresses that instability into a single disorienting gesture. The words “down,” “beneath,” “height,” “above,” and “depth” pull in competing directions. There is no firm ground. The speaker exists in a vertical suspension, aware of both elevation and emptiness. The dash refuses to resolve the image, as if the speaker is still looking over the edge and cannot finish the thought.
The poem’s significance lies in how much it does with so little. Alexander does not tell a story with a clear moral. Instead, he captures a moment after rupture, when the way back has vanished and the way forward is unclear. In the context of the Harlem Renaissance, the image can be read as a subtle reflection on Black artists who climbed into public view while social structures beneath them remained unstable. The winding stairs built by fate might stand for a path shaped by race, history, or ambition—paths that could be pulled away. Alexander’s use of the tanka form makes that feeling of precarious elevation feel universal. The speaker’s high round could belong to anyone who has risen and then looked down.
What lingers is the poem’s unresolved verticality. “Winding,” “fate,” “fell,” “high,” and “depth” are small words, but they build the tension that defines the speaker’s condition. The poem’s music is quiet and speech-like, yet its final image is arresting. In five short lines, Alexander turns the common metaphor of life as a staircase into something stranger and more honest. The stairs are gone, and what remains is not triumph but a precarious awareness of how far one might fall.