"Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered;
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered;
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. "

You've got a group of people who are traveling on this long, rocky road. They've been traveling for a while. Their feet are tired; they've definitely cried.

People have even died—actually, not just died, but been "slaughtered"—on these roads. Then, finally, they arrive at this place that they have always dreamed about. And it shines with a beautiful white light.

So, we've got a white light at the end of this long journey. And it's just chilling there, being all white and shiny. Is it the proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel" (i.e., death)?

That's definitely one interpretation of the light as a symbol: these people have traveled so long on the hard journey of life and now they've reached the hope of rest that's always promised by death. And maybe even heaven.

But there's another way to read this stanza. You guessed it: literally. That stony road is an actual road; those tired feet are actual tired feet.

And where are those tired feet headed? The northern cities that have always been a beacon of hope for those enslaved in the South.

We don't think we need to tell you that, in reality, American's northern cities weren't exactly paradise. But that didn't stop African Americans from making that long trip toward lawful freedom.

We think Johnson's pretty brilliant. He makes his readers experience the difficulty and monotony of the journey made by those migrating north through his writing style. How does he do it? Oh, just by breaking a couple old-fashioned rules of good writing.

Like, putting the object and its adjective before the subject, for example. As in, "Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod." This word order causes the line to become longer and more circuitous than it needs to be.

You have to travel the length of almost one whole sentence before realizing who the main subject is ("we") and what that subject is doing ("trod"). Not that a single sentence can ever be as rough-and-tumble as an actual life journey. But Johnson's lines here at least give us a feel for what the Great Migration was like.

What's another Golden Rule of Writing that Johnson breaks? Avoiding the passive voice. We're sure your English teachers have told you that you should strive to write active sentences. You know, so you don't put your reader to sleep. And so you don't hide away who's doing what in your short story, because the passive voice can make all of life seem purely happenstance.

So, in returning to Johnson's poem, we see the line, "We have come over a way that with tears has been watered." Why does he write the line that way, instead of, "We have come over a way that tears watered"? Why does he get to break that "no passive voice" rule (and we don't, whine)?

Well, Johnson's passive voice also makes the poem's lines longer than they need to be. These wordier sentences meander like people trekking over a winding road. And suddenly, the poem draws you in, and there you are—no longer a student reading a book of poems or perusing Shmoop on the internet, you're now a traveler experiencing the Great Migration along with the poem's subjects.

Poetry: making people time and space travel since early human history.