From The Dark Tower

“From the Dark Tower” is a sonnet by Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. One of Cullen’s best-known works, it was published in his collection Copper Sun (1927). It is the first poem in the book, in the section titled “Color.” In a traditional poetic form, the speaker expresses both his distress at the long oppression of Black people and his optimistic belief that such discrimination will not last forever. A short while later, Cullen used the title of the poem as the name of a regular column (“The Dark Tower”) that he began to write for Opportunities, a Harlem Renaissance magazine. Although “From the Dark Tower” is one of many poems Cullen wrote about race and racism, he believed that poetry transcended race. He preferred to think of himself as a poet rather than as a Black poet, and during his career he wrote many poems he did not specifically tie to race, with themes that include love, religion, and death.

Poet Biography

Countee Cullen was a poet, novelist, and playwright of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. The exact details of his early years are not known, but he was likely born in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 1903. He was raised in New York by Amanda Porter, who was either his grandmother or a family friend, and in 1918 he was adopted by the Reverend and Mrs. Frederick A. Cullen of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, New York City. Cullen entered New York University in 1922 and soon began to attract notice as a poet. He graduated with a BA in 1925 and entered Harvard University in the same year. In that year also, his first poetry collection, Color, was published by Harper & Row, a major publisher. The book was well received and extensively reviewed. It showed that Cullen was already a major writer of the Harlem Renaissance.

Cullen received an MA in English and French from Harvard in 1926. Returning to New York, he became a schoolteacher. His second poetry collection, Copper Sun, which included “From the Dark Tower,” appeared in 1927. It was followed in the same year by The Ballad of the Brown Girl and Caroling Dusk, an anthology of poems by Black poets that became quite influential. In 1928, Cullen married Nina Yolande DuBois, daughter of W. E. B. DuBois, the famous historian, author, and political activist. The marriage did not last, however, and the couple divorced in 1930. In the meantime, Cullen published The Black Christ, and Other Poems (1929). He also traveled to Palestine and Europe. Later, during the 1930s, he would spend many summers in France.

Cullen also turned his attention to prose, publishing a novel, One Way to Heaven (1931). Another poetry collection, The Medea, and Some Poems, followed in 1935. By this time, however, Cullen’s reputation as a poet was in decline. Cullen also wrote two children’s books, The Lost Zoo (1940) and My Nine Lives and How I Lost Them (1942), as well as a musical play, St. Louis Woman (1946), which he coauthored with poet and novelist Arna Bontemps.

Cullen married again in 1940, to Ida Mae Robertson, but they did not enjoy many years together. Cullen died of uremic poisoning and complications from high blood pressure on January 9, 1946, in New York City, at the age of 43. An anthology of his best poems, On These I Stand, was published posthumously in 1947.

Poem Text

We shall not always plant while others reap

The golden increment of bursting fruit,

Not always countenance, abject and mute,

That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;

Not everlastingly while others sleep

Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,

Not always bend to some more subtle brute;

We were not made eternally to weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,

White stars is no less lovely being dark,

And there are buds that cannot bloom at all

In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,

And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

Cullen, Countee. “From the Dark Tower.” 1927. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The speaker begins with the plural pronoun “we,” indicating that they are speaking not only for themselves but for a wider group of people. The first two lines contain a metaphor drawn from nature about planting a seed in the ground that bears rich and desirable fruit. The speaker is likely referring metaphorically to wealth and abundance. However, the speaker states that an unjust situation currently prevails in which one group does the planting but another group enjoys the fruits. The speaker refers to discrimination against Black people; they are not being fairly rewarded for their labor. While pointing this out, though, the speaker also strikes an optimistic note, saying that this situation will not continue forever. Lines 3-4 develop the same theme.

The speaker repeats the notion that an undesirable situation will not endure indefinitely. The oppressed group will not always passively accept an inferior position, in which other people look down upon them and undervalue their worth. Using a musical metaphor, Lines 5 and 6 repeat the same theme in different words. The downtrodden will not always serve and make easy the lives of the group that demeans them and lords over them. Line 7 repeats the idea that the oppressed group will not always be compelled to bend the knee to those who show cunning and treat them with cruelty. Line 8 continues the affirmative, hopeful statements; the misery of the group to which the speaker belongs will not continue forever.

The final six lines expand on the hopefulness that was apparent earlier. Lines 9 and 10 consist of another metaphor drawn from nature: a dark night sky. (“Sable” in Line 9 means black.) The sky is not merely a background against which the stars shine but has beauty in its own right, meaning that Black people are beautiful. Lines 11 and 12 expand on that thought, again with a metaphor drawn from nature. There are flowers, the speaker says, that can only bloom at night; they cannot flourish in daylight. In the final lines, the speaker returns to the oppression of Black people that characterizes the octave (the first eight lines of the sonnet). At present, Black people must hide the hurts they endure because, it is implied, the time is not yet ripe for them to liberate themselves. They must, for the time being, just wait (Line 12) while continuing to nourish the seeds—the patient work they do toward their own betterment—that will eventually bear fruit, even though at the moment it remains painful to do so.