A Formalist Critical Approach to “Heritage” by Countee Cullen

The speaker in “Heritage” expresses profound emotions relating to an African-American perspective of the motherland. Countee Cullen writes in an irregular meter all through the piece, consistently utilizing seven syllables in every line. The speaker is effectually declaring the pains of the slave trade to be innocuous to an African American with the poem’s viewpoint, which is why the speaker is attempting to adopt that viewpoint.

The poem has a nontraditional structure, but the speaker uses recurrences as an even a lot more important element of the work’s type. The very first line is a recurring question throughout the operate, and as the context of the poem is a lot more thoroughly elaborated, this question accrues diverse meanings. In this way, the query is used to drive the poem, every occurrence serving as a sort of checkpoint toward the ultimate aim of understanding the question in depth. In addition to the recurring question, the speaker makes use of two recurring lines, “From the scenes his fathers loved / Spicy grove, cinnamon tree” (lines 8-9) The speaker also starts many statements with a recurring phrase, “So I lie,” which is very first utilised in the eleventh line. It constantly precedes an account of the speaker’s state of thoughts with regard to the recurring query, consistently serving as a marker that a thought procedure is to follow. The second look of the recurring query is juxtaposed with the 1st use of the recurring phrase to exemplify that the latter is and will regularly be the signifies by which the speaker attempts to answer the former, and in between these two lines is the first break of the poem. The nontraditional poetics at work in “Heritage” break into seven verses of varying lines, which will later take on greater significance to the type of the poem.

In the initial line, the recurring query, “What is Africa to me?” is as broad as it sounds. The speaker could imply this any of many various ways however, its second occurrence (line 10) comes right after eight lines of substance, and the images explored in those eight lines are all sharp contrasts. A “copper sun” is a increasing sun, which denotes a morning hour, and a “scarlet sea” is an oceanic horizon on which the light of a setting sun is cast, denoting an evening hour similarly, “jungle star” and “jungle track” are word pairs whose latter elements hold equal contrast in that a star rests incalculably far from earth even though a track (in the sense of a traveled path) is a trail carved into the earth itself. “Strong bronzed men” are contrasted with “regal black women” as properly, and the objective of these sharp contrasts, provided that they are in response to the query in the 1st line (as evidenced by the colon at the end of line 1), is to recommend that the speaker’s partnership to Africa could be anything, the possibilities ranging as far apart as morning and evening or male and female. The recurring question’s second look follows these contrasts to ask of what significance with greater specificity Africa is to the speaker, suggesting that the poem will delve deeper into the answer than just the speaker’s initial, surface thoughts.

In the second verse, the speaker begins with the words, “So I lie, who all day extended / want no sound except the song / sung by wild barbaric birds / goading huge jungle herds.” The significance of these 4 lines is that it tells the reader that the recurring question has moved the speaker to ponder its answer all day it even suggests the speaker is warning the reader that the believed process—the poem itself—has only just begun, which is correct at the commence of the second verse. The speaker describes a reverie of exotic wildlife, a standard imagination of Africa, but inside the description is also “young forest lovers” who get engaged. The typical ground every single of these photos share is a carefree life, whether or not it be for birds of for man. The speaker considers Africa a location of freedom.

Midway by way of the second verse, the recurring phrase, “So I lie,” returns to signify transition to a new image, but the subsequent image is not truly visual rather, it stimulates the auditory sense. The speaker claims to hear drums inexplicably. This image actually foreshadows the rhythm that the speaker possesses in his body, as referenced in lines 63-69 from verse 4, “So I lie, who discover no peace / Evening or day, no slight release / from the unremittent beat / created by cruel padded feet / walking through my body’s street. / Up and down they go, and back, / treading out a jungle track.” In this, the speaker creates ambiguity with the word “beat” since its main denotation in this context is that of rhythm, yet a secondary denotation follows as the speaker describes this rhythm to be the result of frequent footsteps along a “street,” which is the aforementioned “jungle track.” This conjoins the ideas of rhythm and the proverbial beaten path. The speaker wants the reader to receive each denotations simultaneously so as to evoke the typical idea of Africans becoming rhythmic folks. The contextual significance of this ambiguity is that it happens in the speaker’s blood, which suggests it is component of who the speaker is.

The third verse starts with the concept that the purpose the recurring query keeps plaguing him is particularly that the answer is not just elusive but, rather, an answer when possessed and considering that forgotten. The speaker also implies that the search for this answer has, probably, usually been an ongoing search that the speaker is only just now taking the time to pursue with vim. “Africa? A book 1 thumbs / listlessly, till slumber comes. / Unremembered are her bats / circling through the night, her cats, / crouching in the river reeds” (lines 31-35). In these lines, the speaker suggests this is the very first time he or she devoted so significantly time to answering the recurring query.

The speaker proceeds to say, “[…] no far more / does the bugle-throated roar / cry that monarch claws have leapt / from the scabbards exactly where they slept. / Silver snakes that when a year / doff the beautiful coats you wear” (lines 37-42). The speaker is saying that the slave trade has ended, that the rulers of Europe no longer send soldiers armed with swords to Africa. The speaker, then, says, “What’s your nakedness to me?” (line 45), which is the clear marker for a adjust of viewpoint. The speaker is saying that the swords are not intimidating, and the succeeding lines clarify why this is so. “Here no leprous flowers rear / fierce corollas in the air / here no bodies sleek and wet / dripping mingled rain and sweat” (lines 46-49). The speaker’s point of view is shifting toward an answer to the recurring query. The word “leprous” and “fierce” connote that these flowers are representative of white people whom the speaker considers a threat. The slave trade is more than, and so is slavery itself, as evidenced by the reality that the speaker uses lines 46-49 to explain that the Whites are not in Africa and that Blacks are not toiling and suffering in Africa either.

“What is last year’s snow to me, / final year’s anything? The tree / budding yearly need to overlook / how its past arose and set / bough and blossom, flower, fruit” (lines 52-56). The speaker makes use of these lines to conjure imagery that clarify what was foreshadowed in lines 9 and 10, and the foreshadowing is confirmed in the end of verse 3. “One 3 centuries removed / from the scenes his fathers loved, / spicy grove, cinnamon tree, what is Africa to me?” (lines 60-63). These four lines finish each verses 1 and 3, another recurrence that aids drive the poem. The speaker is describing himself with these lines he is the cinnamon tree. It is from the first occurrence of these lines that we know the speaker is male, and the very first-person pronoun in the recurring question is the only word that can determine the pronoun “his,” which is how the speaker is identified as the tree.

As critical as this is to understanding the speaker, it is that significantly far more considerable in the third verse since, in combination with lines 52-56, it describes the answer the speaker is reaching. Snow is identified for killing the plantlife that survives into winter, and “last year” references the speaker’s past. As a tree, the snow killed his growths, but he avers that it is essential to put the past in the past and sally forth to merely continue developing. In spring, the tree buds again, and this signifies the speaker’s will to not permit his personal growth to be stunted by what the snow did moreover, the speaker uses specifically snow since it is white, so the snow on the branches of final year is symbolic of the white oppression of the previous. The speaker proceeds to describe rain as something that channels his African heritage simply because he must dance in it to the rhythm inside his veins. He ends the verse with the words, “In an old remembered way / rain performs on me evening and day” (lines 82-83). This furthers the idea of growth since rain contributes to the development of trees.

The speaker is conflicted now due to the fact the white man has evangelized him. He is a Christian, but he has been told that Jesus could not have been black. He says, “Quaint, outlandish heathen gods / black men fashion out of rods / […] my conversion came high-priced / I belong to Jesus Christ, / […] although I speak / with my mouth as a result, in my heart / do I play a double component. / Ever at Thy glowing altar / should my heart develop sick and falter, / wishing He I served have been black” (lines 84-one hundred). To contact the gods of African nations “heathen” is of a Christian point of view, and it has a very negative connotation nevertheless, the speaker creates a paradox at the finish of the fifth verse by saying that the heathen gods are nothing at all to him due to the fact, though this is accurate in the sense that he does not observe them, it is equally true that they are something to him inasmuch as they are his heritage.

The recurrences drive the poem, which makes them an exceptionally essential part of the work’s form. The recurring query in certain plagues the speaker in the exact same way it plagues the reader since the speaker wants the reader to encounter the question regularly as he has. Also a potent, formal device employed is the use of seven syllables per line with seven verses in total. The speaker describes Jesus Christ as “Jesus of the twice-turned cheek” (line 94), which is about how forgiving Jesus was. Jesus’ forgiveness is equally identified for instructing His disciples to forgive as a lot of as seventy instances seven times. The speaker is not only adhering to the senses of completion and perfection connoted by the seven syllables and verses but also evoking thoughts of forgiveness. He does this to show the reader that the only way to place the past behind him—the process with which he is struggling, the answer to the recurring query that plagues him—is to forgive the white man’s transgression against him.

The speaker has also utilised several other devices to prove that, even though he is conflicted about it, there is an answer he has reached must he select to accept it. In fact, it could be argued that he desires to accept the answer. Ideally, he can blend his heritage with who he is and just continue to grow.