Born in St. Louis in 1898, Lewis Alexander was a poet, playwright, and actor associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and he often experimented with Japanese verse forms. “Japanese Hokku 8” belongs to a numbered sequence in which Alexander adapted the hokku, the compact precursor to the modern haiku, to his own concerns. That context matters: the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s encouraged Black writers to claim a wide range of forms, and Alexander’s outward-looking choice of a Japanese miniature suggests both global curiosity and a commitment to disciplined brevity. Alexander’s hokku sits at a crossroads between Japanese tradition and the urgent self-expression of Black modernism.
The poem describes a speaker at the bottom of a hill who glances upward and registers the path ahead: “Looking up the hill / The road was long before me.” The first two lines feel like an observation. Then the final line reverses expectation with the simplest possible correction: “This road is longer.” That shift from past tense “was” to present tense “is” turns a memory into an immediate realization. What first seemed long now seems longer, and the speaker’s simple act of looking has become a moment of deeper understanding. The central idea is not just that journeys can be difficult, but that true awareness often intensifies our sense of difficulty. The road does not change; the speaker’s perception of it does.
The construction is spare. Alexander avoids rhyme and punctuation, letting the three lines fall with a natural, quiet rhythm. The first line has a rising movement, “Looking up the hill,” that mirrors the physical gesture of lifting one’s eyes. The second line stretches out with “long before me,” and the third line lands hard on the comparative “longer.” That single suffix does all the work. The repetition of “road” in the second and third lines holds the image steady, while the open vowel sounds in “road,” “long,” and “longer” slow the reader down. Even the repeated “l” sounds in “Looking,” “long,” and “longer” thread the lines together, making the comparison feel inevitable. The word “me” is the only direct self-reference, so the speaker remains almost transparent, allowing readers to place themselves on the same slope.
Because the imagery is so restrained—a hill, a road, an upward gaze—the poem invites a wider reading. The uphill road can be any difficult path: a personal struggle, an artistic ambition, or, in the context of Alexander’s era, the long and unfinished road toward racial equality. The word “hill” matters because climbing a hill requires effort and obscures the distance ahead. A road on flat ground might be measured easily; an uphill road keeps its full length hidden. “Looking up” therefore becomes both a physical act and a metaphor for facing what lies ahead with open eyes. The speaker does not turn away. Instead, the final line quietly accepts that the journey is harder than first imagined, and that acceptance is its own kind of strength.
What makes the poem significant is how much it achieves with so little. Alexander borrows a Japanese form often associated with fleeting natural images and makes it carry the weight of human endurance. The poem’s brevity works against exaggeration; there is no dramatic language, only the difference between “long” and “longer.” Yet that small grammatical shift is the whole emotional event. It shows that a hokku can be a space for reckoning, not just for observation. In the context of the Harlem Renaissance, where Black artists were constantly pushing against limits, the poem’s quiet insistence that the road is longer than it appears becomes a subtle but powerful acknowledgment of ongoing struggle.