Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Countee Cullen (1903 - 1946) was a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. He was preoccupied with the question of whether he would be remembered as a poet or as a "Negro poet."

Born in New York, poet Countee Cullen was one of the major contributors to the 1920s literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Through his verse, Cullen gave expression to the character of African-American life as he experienced it.

The Harlem Renaissance, a period of great achievement in African-American art and literature, was pushed to a new high with the 1925 publication of Cullen's volume of poems entitled Color. His sensuous lyric verse expressed themes in the life of his race and shed light on social reality.

Cullen's other verse collections include: Copper Sun (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) and The Black Christ (1 929). His novel, One Way to Heaven, appeared in 1932.

Cullen was awarded the Witter Bynner Undergraduate Poetry Prize from New York University.

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold;
Where long will cling the lips of the moth,
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth;
I hide no hate; I am not even wroth
Who found earth's breath so keen and cold;
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold.

He never spoke a word to me,
And yet He called my name;
He never gave a sign to me,
And yet I knew and came.

At first I said, "I will not bear
His cross upon my back;
He only seeks to place it there
Because my skin is black."

But He was dying for a dream,
And He was very meek,
And in His eyes there shone a gleam
Men journey far to seek.

It was Himself my pity bought;
I did for Christ alone
What all of Rome could not have wrought
With bruise of lash or stone.

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

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