18 pages • 36 minutes read
Countee CullenFrom The Dark Tower
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Racism and the Oppression of Black People
The poem presents a damning indictment of racial discrimination. Black people face discrimination on all fronts. They are not allowed to reap the fruits of their labor because others take these fruits from them. The speaker has white people in mind as the guilty party, as readers in the 1920s and beyond would recognize straightaway. This is made more explicit in the sestet, with the images of light (stars and sunlight) symbolizing white people contrasted with Black people.
The speaker wholly identifies with the oppressed race, as the use of the plural pronoun “we” shows. The speaker shares in their distress and experiences the same injustice. There is no doubting the severity of the situation the speaker portrays. The words “abject and mute” (Line 3) suggest demoralization and helplessness on the part of the oppressed people; the words might equally have been applied to enslaved peoples. The fact that enslavement had been abolished 60 years before Cullen wrote this poem suggests that little progress had been made in establishing civil rights and justice for Black people.
In this poem, Black people are undervalued in every sense of the word, both as human beings and as workers, as Line 4, about “lesser men” who “hold their brothers cheap” conveys. This line shows that white people regard Black people as inferior and keep them poor by underpaying them. The speaker, however, appeals to common humanity rather than race when they refer to Black and white people as “brothers.” This large-mindedness, which fraternally links oppressor and oppressed, makes the fact of discrimination all the more shocking, since it is devoid of any justification.
Be that as it may, the facts as experienced by Black people do not change, as the remaining lines of the octave demonstrate. Although these lines describe the reality of American life as Cullen experienced it in the 1920s, they also reflect the bygone era of enslavement. Like the Black people referenced in the poem, slaves were compelled to tend to their enslavers’ comforts (“beguile their limbs with mellow flute” [Line 6]) and “always bend” (Line 7), that is, always adopt a posture of servile obedience and submission. The starkness of these lines (Lines 5-7), which show the radical disparity in power and authority between the races, brings home the full extent of the problem that has been embedded in American society for so long.
Hope and Waiting
The poem depicts a cruel and demeaning reality for African Americans, but the speaker is nonetheless optimistic. The speaker repeatedly nourishes hope while looking to a better future. They are absolutely convinced that such change will happen, suggesting that present discomforts will not endure forever. Black people will not always have the fruits of their labor taken from them; they will not always be “abject and mute” (Line 3) in the face of their oppression. One day, the speaker says, all this will be different, although they offer no specifics about how or when. The speaker is content to wait, along with his brethren, however painful the waiting might be.
The speaker’s heart, along with those of his fellow African Americans, “bleeds” (Line 13), and yet even that must be disguised and hidden, perhaps because of the necessity to keep going, to not give in to grief, emotional distress, or anger regarding injustice. As African Americans continue to strive to cultivate their own “seeds” (Line 14)—their own culture, economic development and security, and freedom—it is “agonizing” (Line 14) for them because so many things in the wider society combine to thwart them. This is what is today referred to as structural racism, which is why the struggle is so hard, because the disadvantaged people must overcome so many long-established disparities in society. Nonetheless, the speaker, who knows all of these things because they experience them too, assures their fellow survivors that they are, collectively and metaphorically—in the image presented in Lines 11-12—among the plants and flowers that bloom at night, in the dark.
Waiting in hope is therefore a necessary virtue, the speaker explains, and this hope seems to be based on a kind of secular faith in the eventual triumph of justice. It does not appear to be a religious faith, since there is no mention of God. The speaker, although they feel the injustice as keenly as anyone, adopts a kind of stoic detachment proper to the philosopher or sage who observes and records but does not seek to be an activist or leader. Patience, endurance, and hope are the requirements. Nothing can be rushed. Waiting is all.
Unchanging Beauty
If the poem forcefully presents the ugliness of racism, it also conveys a kind of unchanging beauty in its observation of the natural world. Beauty lies beyond the disfiguring stain of racial discrimination. It can be seen in the first image, “The golden increment of bursting fruit” (Line 2), which conveys nature’s fullness that goes on regardless of human malice and ignorance. The sensual immediacy of the image is reminiscent of the poetry of English Romantic poet John Keats, whom Cullen greatly admired and in whose footsteps he tried to follow.
Beauty is apparent also in the first two lines of the sestet: “The night whose sable breast relieves the stark, / White stars is no less lovely being dark” (Lines 9-10), which takes the reader’s attention up to the majesty of the night sky, away from the troubles of human life—the same sky that has been observed by humans since they first walked on the planet. The beauty lies in the shift from the temporal to the eternal. There is even beauty embedded within one of the descriptions of racism, in Lines 5-6: “Not everlastingly while others sleep / Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute.” The context may be disturbing, since the lines present an image of one race being obliged to entertain and make easier the lives of their oppressors, and yet the image of music (“mellow flute”) and the calming effects it has on the human body is a beautiful one. Thus, in the poem as a whole, the speaker manages to celebrate the beauty of life even in the midst of their exposure to the injustices of racism.
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By Countee Cullen
