WHETHER you are Guyanese-born or not, you can be nurtured on Seymour’s keen, honest, and observant verse which understands the involvement of human consciousness outside one’s own nationality, but inside one’s national identity.
Since his first collection, we are aware of his desire to make us conscious of the baseness in Man, via poems on Roman Emperors, or human emotions like jealousy, or tears, etc, and their reason.
In one poem called ‘Prayer’, he reveals touching poetic honesty to oneself in these instructive lines:
‘Teach me my lot in life to love/To be sincere in all I do/In humbleness of heart to move /With a kind spirit me imbue./A quiet star to be my guide/If I’m not chosen…’

Anti-violence verse

His second collection, put out in 1940, clearly shows concern for human happiness at the time of the declaration of the Second World War. And we can transfer this concern to any location or period of human history, since, as an Anglo colony on the South American coast, British Guiana found itself part of the Western Allies. Back then, in the verdant dusty streets of Georgetown, police foot patrols at night warned citizens to dim their lights in deterrence of enemy planes reconnoitering the skies, while, outside the Demerara River’s mouth, merchant ships transporting bauxite over to Britain for the manufacture of RAF planes were sometimes torpedoed by lurking submarines, and many Guyanese seamen lost their lives.
Seymour’s sensitive awareness of his national identity’s link to the cause of non-violence and anti-war positions included poems against the destructive political and social violence he witnessed in 1960s  pre-and-post-Independent Guyana. It is worthy to quote one of the best of these early ant-violence poems, titled ‘Affirmation’, in his small 1940 volume:

‘Guns spitting death can never shake the sun
Nor blast the lovely temper of the day
For all their thunder….they can never slay
Threads though-as-steel, of beauty that have run
Through centuries as black and stern as night…
The earth will wear again her beard of grass
Gladdening our fevered eyes with welcome green,
Will choke the guns’ death-dealing mouths with dust
And throw her living cloak upon their rust’

‘Over Guiana Clouds’

But it is in 1944 that Seymour published his longest, most innovative, and perhaps greatest poem: ‘OVER GUIANA, CLOUDS’. With this poem, he began a more concentrated focus on those aspects of Guyanese reality, which, visualized in its entirety (or as much as he found possible), constitute his national identity. Because the history of Guyana is the most unique or distinct in the entire Latin American, Caribbean region – only Trinidad coming second in some similarity – its repercussive, chronic social problems among its citizens isolates it from any generally inclusive ‘Third World’ definitive model.
Perhaps only Guyanese artists in all genres, if they do not define themselves as simply part of a racial identity, but representatives of a perceived national identity, find themselves inspired by the vision of such an identity, rather than as opportunists who have something to gain by denying its existence.
Seymour rose to the challenge of representing a national identity in poetry, because he possessed a crucial ingredient, without which such an identity can hardly be authentically pursued via creative writing. That ingredient is a thorough knowledge of the history of Guyana, stretching from its pre-Columbian and indigenous past to Dutch, French, British, and Independent eras.
This is not a domain familiar in depth to the average Guyanese; and in fact, if one asks the average citizen which renowned European ruler began the historical European colonization of Guyana, they may not know the name of Prince William I, of Orange, who, in 1580 (before his assassination) proclaimed the freedom of pioneers from the Netherlands, South and North, (the famous ‘Sea Beggars’) to begin trade and settlement on the unknown wild coast of northern South America, which led to the first Dutch trading posts and settlements among native tribes at the mouths of the rivers Courantyne, Abary, and Pomeroon in what is known as Guyana today.
In ‘Over Guiana, Clouds’, Seymour takes us back to the very cosmic atmospheric features of the land, contemporising in verse the unified vision of a national identity for a peculiar country with divided colonial eras, the largest part, Dutch, at the beginning, the second largest, British, in the middle, and the smallest, since national Independence in 1966, at the top. Such a history both consciously and subconsciously perhaps led to ‘divided loyalties’ and fragmented nationalities among many citizens, some of which, tracing their roots back to original indigenous, non-Anglo European, and African cultures, as the first nationalities, while some, such as East Indians, Portuguese, Chinese, Maltese etc, who were introduced into Br.Guiana since the 1830s, after Holland ceded to Britain, might conceive of their nationality only in terms of British Guiana commencing their own era of arrival, and therefore conception of nationality.
The entirety of the national concept which is everyone’s, can therefore be lost. With such a fragmented scenario, Seymour’s poetics of national identity provides vital healing powers here, echoing again Walt Whitman’s deeply cohesive opening lines  in ‘LEAVES OF GRASS’: “I celebrate myself/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”