(1) Contrast the rhythms and tone of Cullen’s “Life’s Rendezvous” with Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” and “The Harlem Dancer” or Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” Express the interplay of youthful optimism and pessimism in each work.
(2) Discuss Cullen’s ethnic pride in “Heritage.” Compare his spirit with that revealed in Carl Sandburg’s Chicago poems, Isabel Allende’s nationalism in House of the Spirits, Amy Tan’s ambivalence toward China in The Kitchen God’s Wife, or tribe-centered lines from N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain or Derek Wolcott’s Caribbean epic Omeros.
(3) Apply Keats’s comment in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that contemplation “doth tease us out of thought / As doth eternity” to the throbbing African cadence that distracts and consumes the speaker in Cullen’s “Heritage.” Determine how and why the two poets can experience a simultaneous ecstasy and misery and why Cullen earned the sobriquet of “the black Keats.”
(4) What does the term “Dark” in the title “The Dark Tower” symbolize? Does this term change meanings throughout the poem? If so, what are the different meanings of the term?
