The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower

The octave of “From the Dark Tower” states the poem's problem in an unconventional, perhaps surprising manner by means of a series of threats. The first threat introduces the conceit of planting, to which the poem returns in its last pair of couplets. (Baker, 1974) The poet begins; we shall not always plant while others reap/the golden increment of bursting fruit. The planting conceit suggests almost immediately the image of slaves working the fields of a Southern plantation. (Ferguson, 1966) Conjuring up this memory of the antebellum South but then asserting by use of the future tense (“We shall not”) that nothing has changed—that is, that the white world has relegated today's African Americans to their former status as slaves, not even as good as second class citizens—Cullen strikes a minor chord of deep, poignant bitterness felt by many contemporary blacks. Yet, what these blacks produce with their planting is richly fertile, a “bursting fruit”; the problem is that “others reap” this “golden increment.” The poet's threat promises that this tide of gross, unjust rapine will soon turn against its perpetrators.

The next few lines compound this initial threat with others. These same oppressed people will not forever bow “abject and mute” to such treatment by a people who have shown by their oppression that they are the inferiors of their victims. “Not everlastingly” will these victims “beguile” this evil race “with mellow flute”; the reader can readily picture scenes of supposedly contented, dancing “darkies” and ostensibly happy minstrel men. “We were not made eternally to weep” declares the poet in the last line of the octave. This line constitutes the volta or turning point in the poem. All the bitterness and resentment implied in the preceding lines is exposed here. An oppressed people simply will not shed tears forever; sorrow and self-pity inevitably turn to anger and rebellion. (Ferguson, 1966)

The first four lines of the sestet state cases in defense of the octave's propositions that these oppressed people, now identified by the comparisons made in these lines as the black race, are no less lovely being dark. The poet returns subtly to his planting conceit by citing the case of flowers which cannot bloom at all/in light, but crumple, piteous, and fall. From the infinite heavens to finite flowers of earth Cullen takes his reader, grasping universal and particular significance for his people and thereby restoring and ...