From The Dark Tower

The title itself suggests the theme of the poem: The dark, in this context, represents skin color or race, and a tower suggests a strong structure that reaches high into the air from which a person can survey their surroundings. A person can see far, which is exactly what the poem’s speaker does. The speaker sees past and present and looks to the future for his people. The speaker acknowledges the present reality of injustice but confidently expresses their belief that the future will be different, and better.

In the organic metaphor that makes up Lines 1 and 2, life offers much for people to enjoy: “The golden increment of bursting fruit” conveys value (“golden”), growth and abundance (“increment”), and the ripeness and lusciousness of life (“bursting fruit”). However, Black people are cut off from enjoying all that life has to offer by an unfair social and political system. Be that as it may, the speaker does not wallow in despair or even express anger about it. The speaker’s voice is a calm one. They confidently and unequivocally state in the opening phrase: “We shall not always plant while others reap” (Line 1). The speaker thus identifies as a spokesperson for their race, and they reassure their race that there will eventually be an end to the inequality and discrimination that they are currently forced to endure. The speaker knows their plight is extreme and they are beaten down, as Line 3 shows; they are “abject and mute.” They put up with injustice silently; they have no voice to assert themselves and their position in life is wretched, lacking dignity or pride (“abject”). They are, in effect, held captive by those who are “lesser men” (Line 4) than they.

The situation the speaker presents is dire, and yet in all four of the ways in which the speaker describes the oppression, they make an affirmation that this distressing situation will not last forever: “We shall not always” (Line 1); “Not always countenance” (Line 3); “Not everlastingly” (Line 5); “Not always” (Line 7). The tone is confident and certain, although the speaker presents no prescription for action and no specific vision of what that future might look like, other than not like the past. The speaker is content to stand back and take the long view. In the fullness of time, the speaker says, all this will change: Life will be different for us; there is nothing eternally fixed or inherent in nature that dictates our continued oppression.

Having focused in the octave on temporary conditions and the belief that they will change, the speaker uses the first four lines of the sestet to emphasize what is absolutely and always the case. These lines affirm that, to use an expression that became common several decades later in the 1960s, “Black is beautiful.” To show this, the speaker uses a metaphor drawn from the heavens: the blackness of the night sky is beautiful in itself; it is not the stars that make it so. Indeed, the speaker presents the stars as not particularly attractive, describing them as “stark, / White stars” (Lines 9-10). The word “stark” suggests not only bare in appearance but perhaps also harsh and desolate. Continuing the theme in the following two lines, the speaker states that not all flowers depend on sunlight; sunlight can actually be harmful to some flowers, which “crumple, piteous, and fall” (Line 12) when exposed to it. Thus, stars and sunlight have been turned not exactly into negative images, but certainly into something that is less than always positive in every case.

By the final two lines, the speaker has transformed “dark” into a symbol of beauty and potency. It has been rehabilitated from any negative notions it may have previously acquired. It is now a kind of procreative womb that contains the suffering of a people and will eventually produce something much more deserved and also long awaited: “So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds / And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds” (Lines 13-14). These final lines return to the topic of the octave: The present situation for a patient Black population. Again, the speaker advocates no course of action and presents no manifesto. The speaker issues no call to protest or call to arms, offering instead solace and hope; other than that, the speaker is content simply to “wait” (Line 14) with their people for a new day to dawn.