At the age of 21, Cullen employed the standard English ballad stanza for “Incident,” an impromptu but sturdy memoir of meeting a vulgar, impudent boy his own age. Set in Baltimore, the three-stanza recollection focuses on a youthful anticipation spoiled by an adversary’s out-thrust tongue, which is both childish and ominous of future encounters with racism. The inevitable epithet “Nigger” reminds the speaker of the invisible boundary between blacks and whites. Composed in the raw stages of the poet’s development, “Incident” minimizes action and states poetry’s aims—to clarify and enlarge on human behaviors and attitudes in a single image.
That same year, Cullen produced a more polished effort, “From the Dark Tower,” a fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet that illustrates the form’s division into octet and sestet for the purpose of presenting a problem and a solution. In the opening five-beat lines, he speaks generally about the eventual demise of servitude, which he pictures as reaping others’ harvests and entertaining the master with soulful flute music. Majestically, the closing lines turn to two examples from nature—the star-pocked night and frail blossoms that flourish out of the sun—to express the beauties of darkness. He closes with anticipation of a better time, when the poet’s heartfelt “seeds” will flourish.
Keatsian in tone, style, and imagery, the poem refrains from the bold thrust of “Incident” with a genteel, almost tender restraint. His choice of romantic terms like “beguile,” “sable breast,” and “no less lovely” disclose the poet’s immersion in nineteenth-century romanticism and in the stylistic touches common to European masters. With consummate skill, he links monosyllables in a firm rhyme scheme of abbaabbaccddee. The rhymes focus on a pure ee, oo, and ah sounds. Nearly obscured by classic grace and technical perfection are the implications of the plantation’s “bursting fruit,” a foreboding of the former slave’s own seeds, which produce a tortured mix of anguish and promise.
In 1925, Cullen crafted one of the most memorable works of the Harlem Renaissance, “Yet Do I Marvel,” an Elizabethan sonnet showcasing a saucy, yet poignant retort that has become a prized epigram. In the opening octave, the speaker ponders the purpose of God’s creation, which immures the blind mole underground just as it shrouds human spirits in mortal flesh. Turning to the standard Greek images of the underworld, where Tantalus forever snatches at a grape cluster out of range of his fingers and Sisyphus never pushes the boulder to the top of the hill, the speaker hesitates to accuse God of torment. In answer to the puzzle, he avoids militance or sacrilege to conclude that the human mind is incapable of judging God’s actions. Still, the one question won’t stop nagging at him: Why would God create a black poet and place him in a world where white domination suppresses the nonwhite writer’s song?
At the height of his poetic power, Cullen wrote his masterpiece, “Heritage,” a beguiling, lyric odyssey set in a hypnotic three-beat line. Evocative and moody, the rhapsodic journey takes the speaker on a mental tour of Africa’s beauty. Along the coast on paths echoing bird voices, he enters jungle bowers. With careless ease, the speaker ponders beasts of the savannahs and the black lovers who couple freely in “tall defiant grass.” Without specifying a fault, the speaker makes a pun on lie, meaning “recline” and “falsify,” in token of his or her concealment of Negro heritage. By deliberately shutting out the jungle thrum, the speaker rejects the blackness that courses through the speaker’s veins like a bloodtide that threatens to overwhelm human control.
Combining wry commentary with mysticism, the viewer, paging through a book on Africa, muses over the hidden snake sloughing its skin and the furtive lovers concealed in rainforest damp. The speaker questions a driving, elusively erotic impulse to slip back in time to Africa’s former grandeur. He ignores self-doubt and proceeds along the imaginative path, alliterating bough with blossom and flower with fruit as the eye converges on the tentative nest-building of a jungle bird. The image returns the speaker to the initial question: Why yearn for a fragrant land that his ancestors left 300 years ago?
In the falling action of the speaker’s anguish, he continues to conceal the internal throb of black heritage. Obsessed in mind and spirit, he enunciates “primal measures,” a carnal music that impels the body to nakedness and the feet to tread forbidden measures out of keeping with a Christian upbringing. At the poem’s high point, he must admit “a double part,” a duplicity of behavior and identity that conceals love of blackness and primitivism. In the last twelve lines, the speaker acknowledges a poignant truth—that leading a double life is hazardous if it masks fierce yearnings.
