On “Heritage”

                                                           David K. Kirby

An ethnic work by its very nature will appeal first to a minority of readers; if it is successful not only in its appeal to ethnic interests but also in its ability to attract a wider readership as well, then it has transcended its ostensibly narrow focus and it becomes a work of art in the universal sense. This is the case with Cullen’s poem "Heritage," which I have called a black Waste Land because it deals with the same basic dilemma as the Eliot poem—that of the modern individual, aware of his rich heritage yet stranded in a sterile, conformist culture—and because it shares with that poem some similar imagery.

"Heritage" consists of seven stanzas, and I believe that it can be understood best if one considers each of these as a distinctive unit and also as a part of the whole; with this in mind, I have presumed to assign to each stanza a title, much as Eliot entitled each section of his poem.

Stanza I (quoted below in its entirety) I have called "The Question" because it poses the recurring question of the poem:

What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?

Thus Cullen begins with a question concerning the nature of an abstract and rather remote Africa. He then lists some concrete images which serve as specific foci for his speculations: sun and sea, sky and earth, man and woman. The fact that the next few lines are italicized indicates a shift of viewpoint as the persona turns inward and makes an attempt to place himself subjectively in relation to his heritage. However, having considered all the ramifications—external and internal, public and private, tangible and intangible—he still has no answer to his question, and so he poses it once more in the last line. The rest of the poem represents his attempt at an answer.

Stanza II I call "The Flood" after its controlling image. It begins:

In the section of The Waste Land entitled "The Fire Sermon," the romance of bygone days as represented by the affair of Elizabeth and Leicester is depicted as far superior to the loveless fornication of the modern couple, the "young man carbuncular" and his blasé lady friend. The lines above deal with an analogous situation; here the healthy and life-creating sex of the persona’s ancestors (cf. a similar image in the first stanza) becomes for him merely an autoerotic fantasy.

It is of significance that the persona spends his days recumbent, dreaming of the sights and sounds of his native country. He is in effect paralyzed: caught between two cultures, he is as impotent as Eliot’s Fisher King (these lines also recall another image of ineffectual man, that of the "patient etherized upon a table" which begins "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"). His African heritage preoccupies him; yet, because he must conform to the dictates of a predominantly white culture that is not concerned with his ethnic origins, he is forced to deny the primitive rhythms that pulse through his body:

The stanza ends with an image of the conflict between his "fount of pride," his consciousness of his heritage, and the social strictures which are imposed upon him:

A hasty reader might consider this image of a net which contains a flood an unsuccessful one. Of course a net cannot contain a flood, but that is precisely the point: that sooner or later, his pride will be manifest in a heady, intoxicating rush against which the strictures of a repressive society are of no avail.

In a temporal sense, these lines point in both directions. In the first place, they point to the past, in that the net recalls the method of entrapment used against the original slaves. In addition, the image is prophetic as well insofar as it foreshadows the reawakening of black pride that took place in this country in the 1960’s.

The third stanza may be entitled "The Net," since it deals with the persona’s attempts to adhere to the conformist practices of his society, to control his pride by denying it. He reduces his native land, which is boundless in his imagination, to an insignificant artifact of the white culture:

He pretends to disavow the natural images that preoccupied him in the previous stanza, but the detail with which he describes them gives the lie to his avowed unconcern:

He addresses himself to the snakes, traditional symbols of power, and explains that he has not interest in them:

By implication, he is also uninterested in what the snakes stand for. He pretends to be unconcerned with the power that his heritage can bestow upon him, power that would certainly pose a threat to his adopted society.

Again the image of primitive love occurs:

The last lines of this stanza are particularly concerned with time; in an apparent reference to Villon’s well-known refrain, he asks:

The reason for his apparent lack of concern is made clear in the image of the budding tree which follows:

The implication is that society, for its own safety, must insist that the majority of its members function in regular, cyclical patterns. The persona realized that, if he is to do this, he had better disengage himself form the contemplations of his origins. He must have no past, only a present; the more closely he resembles a tree—a mindless organism which functions according to a predictable pattern—the better. Here Cullen turns a natural image against the persona in order to indicate the full desperation of his plight.

The fourth stanza may be entitled "The Rain":

These lines are significant in several ways. (Of course they are at least superficially appropriate in that much of Africa is subject to the torrential rainfalls that are peculiar to the tropics.) In the first place, there is the implication that the persona is closely allied with natural forces, as some of the images previously discussed have indicated. Too, this alliance is one that dates back to the very beginnings of his race, as he vaguely senses: "In an old remembered way / Rain works on me night and day."

However, the image of the rain does more than merely reinforce certain ideas that have already been introduced. A parallel may be drawn between this stanza and that section of The Waste Land which is entitled "What the Thunder Said," for just as the Thunder speaks to the Fisher King in Sanscrit, the mother of all Western tongues, so the rain speaks to the persona of "Heritage" in a primal language that he understands. It is also in this stanza that another similarity in imagery between the two poems becomes apparent, for both poems deal with the impending flood (alluded to in the second stanza of "Heritage" as well), the waters that will wash away the old, the dry, and the sterile and prepare the world for fertility and growth.

The brief fight stanza I shall call "The Gods"; it deals first with the pagan deities of Africa:

The lines that follow deal with the God of the white culture and the sacrifice that the persona has made in accepting Him over the black gods of Africa:

Note, in the final line of this stanza, the familiar yet (by now) somewhat hollow disclaimer by the persona of his heritage. As we shall see in the next stanza, the persona, like his forebears, does indeed fashion a deity in a likeness that is similar to his own.

In the sixth stanza, which I have called "The Black Christ," the personal addresses the son of God directly:

The persona’s point is well taken. The Biblical Christ is referred to as a "man of sorrows," and certainly the black, by nature of his status in a white culture, is a man of sorrows in a secular sense. If blackness and suffering are so closely related in the persona’s mind, then his Christ perforce must be a black one. In the lines that follow, the persona again makes clear the relation between himself and his past as he emulates the iconographic activity of his ancestors:

Thus, unable to practice the lost religion of his forefathers and equally unable to worship the white man’s Christ, the persona has taken the significant features of the two public modes of worship and has made from them a private variety. His black Christ is a personal synthesis of the heathen god and the Christian one. It should be noted, however, that the persona’s deity can afford him only temporary consolation and that the basic problem—the conflict of the two cultures in his mind—is still unresolved.

The last stanza I have called "Fire and Water."

The central image of the flood, mentioned in the second and fourth stanzas, is mentioned again, as are the fears of the persona that the flood of pride will burst forth and overwhelm him, washing away the props of whatever stability he may have acquired. He recognizes, however, that there is danger from another quarter as well:

The persona is thus trapped between the waters of pride and the fires of frustration; again, the ideas of impotence and paralysis are reinforced. Further, there is in these lines an ominous suggestion that the forces of pride and frustration (which are antithetical, as the images of fire and water suggest) may cancel each other out and destroy the persona, who is caught in the middle.

The final lines of this stanza serve as a commentary upon the entire poem:

Here again the similarity between "Heritage" and The Waste Land is apparent. Both poems deal with the gap that exists between contemporary man, who is sensitive to his cultural heritage, and the society which seems dry and sterile in comparison. The word "civilized" is used ironically here, for surely the persona—and the reader as well, by this point—realizes that the word in this context has rather uncharacteristically negative connotations, at least as far as the persona’s own "heart" and "head" are concerned.

"Heritage" was collected in Cullen’s first book of poems, entitled Color. Beneath the last lines of the poem there is a drawing of a powerful black figure with his hands clasped tightly over his ears. He is sitting in a jungle glade which has a dreamlike or visionary quality about it; a light rain is falling. Like the Fisher King in Eliot’s poem, the persona is last seen sitting and waiting for the rain which will wash away the sterile culture and make possible a new fertility. I have mentioned earlier that "Heritage" was a prophetic poem; it would seem that its prophecy is being fulfilled today in that so many blacks have cast off the skin lighteners and hair straighteners that an essentially alien culture has forced upon them and have taken up the colorful garb of their native land, the "natural" hairdo, and the study of such language as Swahili. It is as though the black American has discovered his roots in another culture because he has none in this one. One wonders; if the white man were similarly disadvantaged, would he pine with equal intensity for the lost heritage of which Eliot writes?

                                                            Jean Wagner

There can hardly be any doubt, then, that Cullen's pagan Africa must be viewed as the projection of half of himself—but no more than half, for just as the two parts of "Heritage" contrast the profane and the sacred and within each part depict the rational constituents of the Western World as locked in combat with the emotional forces of racial atavism, similarly the mystique of race and of its cradle in Africa is but the first stage in the poet's inner striving to effect a reconciliation between irreconcilables and so to attain the unity he longed for.

After emerging victorious from this first stage, he can speak of the pointlessness of "any nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance." For by then he had discovered that Africa was only a pretext for escape, an opportunity offered the individual to flee from the relevant reality around him into a cloudland of dream and illusion. When all was said and done, it was an invitation to flee from oneself. And so the dream of Africa becomes, in a way, transformed into the antithesis of any authentic inner life, for the individual is dispensed thereby from the struggle to transcend self, lulled to sleep on the path leading to spiritual values, and provided with an instantaneous gratification of the urges of a tormented psyche. Like jazz, Africa is both opiate and intoxicating whirl, not balm that heals once and for all, since nothing is gained beyond a provisional, illusive, emotional equilibrium.

                                                           Houston Baker, Jr.

The vivid descriptions of its fierce flowers and pagan impulses show that Africa is much more than bedtime reading for the narrator. Moreover, when he states that he is trying to move beyond the call of heathen deities, the text leaps forth in refutation. Some critics have faulted Cullen for "Heritage," stating that he makes topographical mistakes and perpetuates the idea of the black man as a "noble savage." Such responses can carry one only so far, however, with a poem as thoroughly ironical as "Heritage." While it is true that there is an undue enthusiasm recurrent in the passages on Africa, it is also true that Cullen was interested in a blatant contrast between the benign and unsmiling deities of the new land and the thoroughly initiated gods of the old. The entire poem is placed in a confessional framework as the narrator tries to define his relationship to some white, ontological being and finds that a black impulse ceaselessly draws him back.

                                                           Gerald Early

Some readers have criticized "Heritage" for not offering more realistic images of Africa, decrying Cullen’s ignorance but that is one of the levels on which the poem, the narrator is lying. These images of Africa are lies; certainly Cullen knew that. But is the poem also lying when it suggests that Africa means nothing to the narrator? Or is the poem lying when it suggests that Africa means anything to the narrator? Or is this very interiorized speech-act, speech-event poem nothing more than the system of lies that the impotent black intellectual uses to heal his own sickness of alienation and despair? The poem deals with the black narrator's own trinity: body ("the dark blood dammed within" and the word "dammed" of course is a pun), mind ("Africa? A book one thumbs / listlessly, till slumber comes"), and heart/spirit ("Lord, forgive me if my need / Sometimes shapes a human creed"), which has been thoroughly "civilized" or acculturated, trapped in language and reflection, a room of nothing but sound. But that whole business might be lies as well. The poem does not solve anything as the speaker can neither experience true conversion—the only act that can save him—nor deny it.

                                                           Ronald E. Sheasby

Many critics have pointed out that Countee Cullen's poetry was written largely in traditional English forms, such as the sonnet, and was heavily influenced by the romantic poets, most of all John Keats. However, no one has yet suggested that Cullen's "Heritage," his best and most famous work, may owe a debt to William Blake's "The Tiger." This paper will.

That a black American of the twentieth century should adopt a style popular among white Englishmen of the previous one offends some people and fills others with pride and pleasure. Those who like it see a black man expressing racial and nonracial themes in traditional and beautiful ways; those who do not like it see a slavish imitation which weakens the antiracist poetry and dilutes the rest.

Gerald Early is one of the latter, calling Cullen's use of traditional forms "quaint and old fashioned." Cullen uses the clause "so I lie" so often in "Heritage" that Early thinks he may be also lying when he says that Africa is important to him (59-60). Early is not certain, but Darwin T. Turner is: he calls Cullen a liar who fakes an African heritage, though being neither particularly black nor militant; his conventional poetic devices mask his pretense. Harvey Curtis Webster agrees, and Blyden Jackson adds the condemnation that Countee was black but had a white outlook.

In Silence to the Drums, Margaret Perry sees Cullen's romantic heritage as a mixed blessing, both inspiring and hampering him, elsewhere comparing him favorably to John Keats. Houston A. Baker, Jr., is also ambivalent: Countee has to use traditional forms to please the white audience and African themes to satisfy the black one; it is perhaps because of this that he is simply "a minor poet" who never achieves the "Vision Splendid."

Alan R. Shucard is unequivocal in his praise: Countee Cullen is an "absolute master of conventional structures and language." Writing with a true lyric gift, Cullen produces pretty poems such as "Heritage." Ronald Primeau sees the Keatsian influence as positive: the imagery and theme of "Heritage" shows traces of the Englishman. Gary Smith adds that Cullen chooses sonnets because those forms lend themselves rather well to syllogistic reasoning, an approach that is used in the racial poems, and Richard Lederer agrees (219-23). And, finally, Baker quotes James Weldon Johnson:

And so, whether or not Countee "sold out" or heightened his themes by the use of traditional romantic forms, all agree that he did, indeed, use those forms. Let us turn to the poem itself. "Heritage" first appeared in the 1 March 1925 Survey. Since the poem was published well before Cullen's Harvard matriculation (where, incidentally, his studies led him to produce "the first rime royal in America," according to Robert Hillyer), we must turn to his NYU days for a time of composition and possible influences. Apart from school magazines, there is no record of a published poem by Countee Cullen before NYU.

Cullen did not study at NYU under a Blake scholar but he did take most of his courses from a traditionalist—a Keats specialist and a collector of ballads named Hyder Rollins—including a course entitled English Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. Tuttleleton says that Rollins had written books on both Keats and ballads, and adds that "there is no doubt that for Hyder Rollins the English tradition from the Middle Ages onward was the right foundation for a poet." It would not take much of an imagination to picture that somewhere in the above-mentioned two-semester poetry survey course was an analysis of William Blake's "The Tiger." Young Countee's mind must have been like a sponge, incorporating everything he studied—and if he did study Blake's poem, it would not be too much of a surprise to find it reappearing, considerably altered, to be sure, but reappearing nonetheless, in the body of Cullen's poetry! Let us look at both poems in question.

William Blake's "The Tiger" is written in either iambic tetrameter truncated or trochaic tetrameter catalectic. The last stanza exactly repeats the first:

The second couplet is characterized by a half rhyme-eye and symmetry, and ends with a question; indeed, every stanza in the poem ends with a question which either announces or repeats the theme: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" The capitalized "Lamb" evokes "the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world," Jesus Christ. According to Robert Hillyer, this poem was a companion piece for "The Lamb," which overtly Christianizes lambs: "He is called by thy name / For he calls himself a lamb." "The Tiger" asks if the creator who made Jesus also made the big cat, suggesting a pagan, non-Christian and lower-case god similar to those described in William Ernest Henley's "Invictus," a god who made the tiger while another lamb-like Christian God made the Iamb and the Lamb. How could one deity make both? Imagery of fire dominates the poem until almost the end. The tiger's eyes are "burning bright," with references to their fire: "What the hand dare seize the fire?" is asked, then "In what furnace was thy brain?" Soon, however, the imagery shifts to water. Stars throw "Down their spears," then water "Heaven with their tears." Having briefly digressed from fire to water, Blake returns to his furnace: "Tiger, tiger, burning bright. . . ." Blake's imagery thus comes full circle, from fire to water and back to fire.

Countee Cullen's "Heritage" is written in either iambic tetrameter truncated or trochaic tetrameter catalectic. He repeats his thematic question "What is Africa to me?" several times, word for word and in variations such as "What's your nakedness to me?" or "What is last year's snow to me?" And he twice repeats an italicized chorus that echoes Blake's opening and closing stanza syllable for syllable, beat for beat:

And just as Blake half rhymes "eye" and "symmetry," Cullen half rhymes "removed" and "loved."

The echoes extend far beyond meter and rhyme. As Blake's theme is announced by answering "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" Cullen answers "What is Africa to me?"

The black narrator trying to relate to a white god is a contradiction at least as striking as a God (or gods) who makes tigers and lambs (or Lambs). The poet is Christian but black; Africa calls to him with the burning eyes of a tiger hidden in the deep, lush, green jungle. There is no release

Now the tiger, or at least a near relative, is stalking through Cullen’s poem and body!

Some tiger-like animals appear elsewhere in this poem: cats crouch

The "monarch claws" suggest lions rather than tigers, but they are both predatory cats—and described as making circles "through the night," not unlike Blake's tiger, eyes aflame "in the forests of the night."

And Blake's "forests of the night" are composed of trees like this:

or these:

Water imagery dominates "Heritage," until almost the very end, when it shifts to fire, somewhat the opposite of "The Tiger," which goes from fire to water and back to fire.

The links with Christianity once established ("fount" and "wine"), he continues with water:

The poet says that he must "Quench my pride and cool my blood, / Lest I perish in the flood." He then switches images, just as does Blake, and continues:

and five lines later, concludes his poem.

The narrator's dilemma is that he is neither Iamb nor tiger, pagan nor Christian, native African nor inheritor and modifier of the romantic tradition—and it is in this very dichotomy that "Heritage" most resembles "The Tiger." What sort of world is it, both poets ask, that has meek lambs and barbaric tigers, the Christian God and pagan gods, poets who write out of the romantic tradition but whose ancestors come from darkest Africa? It is the same question which Countee Cullen asks in "Yet Do I Marvel": What sort of God would "make a poet black and bid him sing"? Caucasian William Blake had no such concern—but still in all, he saw the world divided into two parts, and so did Countee Cullen.

There are other differences, as well. Blake's work is much shorter, only twenty-four lines, asking fourteen questions. "Heritage" asks six questions and takes 129 lines to do it. However, Cullen deliberately modeled "The Ballad of the Brown Girl" after an old English source that was either ten or fifteen lines long, depending on the source book. Cullen's ballad is very nearly exactly as much longer than its model as "Heritage" is longer than "The Tiger"!

Cullen's poem, despite its structural similarities to Blake's, flows more rhythmically, pulsing in a manner more evocative of jungle drums, somewhat reminiscent of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo." A reader of "The Tiger" sees feline eyes glowing in the dark; a reader of "Heritage" hears "Great drums throbbing through the air."

And finally, Blake writes of a tiger, Cullen about a man. However, that highlights the difference between plagiarism and the sort of modeling (or at least unconscious influence) that I am suggesting. Cullen took bits and pieces—meter, rhyme scheme, symbolism, theme—from Blake and echoed them in his own poem, about his own experiences, in ultimately his own way.

So there are identical meters and rhyme schemes, the repetition of thematically significant questions in both poems. There is a similar dichotomy in both, the Lamb of God versus paganism, and the appearance of predatory felines, as well as the trees of the jungle—and water turning into fire, which turns into water. And, of course, there are all those critics agreeing that Countee Cullen was heavily influenced by traditional English sources.

Are such echoes deliberate, as Cullen's work with ballads was? I do not know—nor do I think anybody does, at least until further evidence appears. They are at the very least unconscious, and it may be that some overt modeling took place, as well. Did he model "Heritage" after "The Tiger"? Perhaps. Was Cullen's poem influenced by Blake's? It seems likely. Did Cullen even read "The Tiger?" Almost certainly, but I can not prove it.

Geniuses such as Countee Cullen are readers before they are poets or novelists—and after they start writing, they continue to read. Almost all writers read voraciously, and many, if not all, write in occasional imitation of those writers they most admire. Sometimes this is deliberate, sometimes unconscious. It is not important whether or not they occasionally mirror their sources (Need I mention more than Shakespeare?) as it is how well they execute their designs, how well the finished product flows organically. Poetry is meant to be enjoyed, with or without a knowledge of the influences that might have helped shape it. And "Heritage" is a poem that people have enjoyed reading for over two thirds of the twentieth century! It seems petty to criticize its creator for using language more germane to the nineteenth.

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