Lewis Alexander, a poet and playwright of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote at a time when African American artists were reimagining the possibilities of black expression. Although he is less widely remembered than Langston Hughes or Countee Cullen, Alexander brought a distinctive global curiosity to that movement: he experimented with Japanese forms, including the tanka, whose brevity suited the modern taste for sharp imagery. “Tanka II” is one of those experiments, and it turns a traditional thirty-one-syllable Japanese pattern into a compressed study of inner emptiness.
The poem opens with a curious act of vision: “Through the eyes of life / I looked in at my own heart.” The speaker does not say “my eyes” or even “life’s eyes”; the phrase “the eyes of life” creates a distance, as though living itself has become a detached witness. What the speaker sees is not a fleshy heart but a landscape: “A long furrowed field / Grown cement waiting for seed / Baking in desolation.” That landscape is the poem’s central idea. The heart has been plowed, prepared, made ready for something to grow, but it has hardened instead. “Furrowed” implies past labor and promise, while “grown cement” is a paradox—growth usually means life, but here what grows is impermeable pavement. The seed is absent, only expected, and the field “bakes” in its own emptiness.
The construction is as tight as the tanka form demands. It follows the traditional 5-7-5-7-7 syllable count without making the lines feel mechanical. The opening line, five syllables long, is calm and almost impersonal; the second line, seven syllables, introduces the intimate target of inspection, “my own heart.” A colon after “heart” works like a door: it opens from the inward-looking first sentence into the outdoor imagery that follows. There is no rhyme, and the effect is closer to a quiet, uneasy thought than to a song. The repeated long vowel sounds in “long furrowed field” stretch the line out, mimicking the field’s length, while the hard c and t of “Grown cement waiting” break that smoothness with a heavier, more resistant texture. The word “baking” adds heat, not fertility; it suggests sun and drought rather than growth. The final noun, “desolation,” lands with four slow syllables, leaving the reader inside that bare landscape.
What makes the poem significant is its ability to make a small form hold a large, unresolved grief. Alexander wrote in a decade often associated with public assertion, jazz energy, and racial pride, yet this poem turns inward and finds a private drought. The image of a heart covered in cement can be read personally—emotional numbness or exhaustion—or more broadly, as the accumulated cost of living under conditions that wear down a person’s ability to hope. Because Alexander does not name the cause, the poem remains open. At the same time, its use of a Japanese form by an African American poet is itself a quiet argument for cross-cultural imagination. The tanka’s discipline keeps the despair from becoming rhetorical; every word has to carry weight. In five lines, a speaker looks into himself and finds a field that cannot receive seed. That is the poem’s lasting unease: a fertile shape that has lost the conditions for fertility, baking under a sun that gives nothing back.