Tag Archives: Countee Cullen

BOOKS: “Color” by Countee Cullen

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Color (AmazonClassics Edition)Color by Countee Cullen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Available on Project Gutenberg

This excellent collection of lyric poetry is by one of the greats of the Harlem Rennaissance. The poems include a range of forms and sizes from single quatrain epitaphs to poems of several pages, with those in between (including a number of sonnets) being most common. Like Dickinson, Cullen had a fondness for common meter (a.k.a. hymn meter,) and it is prevalent throughout. The topics include serious matters, such as race and death, but there is no lack of whimsicality within these pages.

The book is divided into four sections: “Color,” “Epitaphs,” “For Love’s Sake,” and “Varia.” The first is the most serious of tone. (Interestingly, the epitaphs and other poems on death often take a lighthearted, even humorous, tone.)

I’d highly recommend this collection for poetry readers. It’s fun to read, and the poems are skillfully crafted.

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“The Wise” by Countee Cullen [w/ Audio]

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(For Alain Loch)

Dead men are wisest, for they know
 How far the roots of flowers go,
 How long a seed must rot to grow.

Dead men alone bear frost and rain
 On throbless heart and heatless brain,
 And feel no stir of joy or pain.

Dead men alone are satiate;
 They sleep and dream and have no weight,
 To curb their rest, of love or hate.

Strange, men should flee their company,
 Or think me strange who long to be
 Wrapped in their cool immunity.

“Thoughts in a Zoo” by Countee Cullen [w/ Audio]

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They in their cruel traps, and we in ours,
 Survey each other's rage, and pass the hours
 Commiserating each the other's woe,
 To mitigate his own pain's fiery glow.
 Man could but little proffer in exchange
 Save that his cages have a larger range.
 That lion with his lordly, untamed heart
 Has in some man his human counterpart,
 Some lofty soul in dreams and visions wrapped,
 But in the stifling flesh securely trapped.
 Guant eagle whose raw pinions stain the bars
 That prison you, so men cry for the stars!
 Some delve down like the mole far underground,
 (Their nature is to burrow, not to bound),
 Some, like the snake, with changeless slothful eye,
 Stir not, but sleep and smoulder where they lie.
 Who is most wretched, these caged ones, or we,
 Caught in a vastness beyond our sight to see?