18 pages • 36 minutes read
Countee CullenA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
In “Incident,” Countee Cullen relies on diction, juxtaposition, and irony to represent the impact of racism on a Black child’s identity formation. The poem is a narrative in which the overall movement is from innocence to knowledge and from joy to pain.
In the first stanza, the speaker sets the tone through diction: “Heart-filled, head-filled with glee” (Line 2) captures the exuberance of the child, whose emotions and intellect are stimulated, overwhelmed even, by the novel yet joyful sights of a city. The child is free—riding through the city from a perch where they can see everything despite their small size. Cullen relies on ballad meter (see: Literary Devices), which lends the lines a skipping rhythm that makes sense for the voice of a child. When the child-speaker encounters the little boy, the staring child is just one more object of curiosity that allows the child-speaker to see what a “Baltimorean” (Line 3) looks like. The child-speaker and the little boy have parity: They are just two children looking at each other with no hint of racial conflict.
By Countee Cullen