"From the Dark Tower" is a poem by American author Countee Cullen detailing the struggle of Black individuals to receive recognition for their work. Originally published in 1927, the poem appeared in Cullen's second collection, Copper Sun. Cullen was born in 1903, and claimed to be from Louisville, Kentucky, though historians have noted that they have no medical documentation to confirm this. At the age of nine, Cullen came to Harlem and was raised by his grandmother and was later adopted by Methodist preacher Frederick A. Cullen. He went on to study at New York University and Harvard, receiving academic recognition and publishing his poems in national magazines like Harper's, Poetry, and Crisis. Following this sudden rise to prominence, Cullen became a fixture of the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, alongside luminaries like Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer. While his work often dealt with scenes from the lives of Black communities, his style was heavily influenced by white poets like John Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay. In this particular poem, he uses pastoral imagery to convey how Black individuals are not given credit for their labor.
The poem features a first-person plural speaker, who begins by saying they will not endlessly plant fruits for other people to take. They echo this sentiment two more times, adding that they will not stand silently by and bend to the will of "brutes." He says that they should not have to continually "weep." The next stanza describes the beauty of the dark parts of the night sky. The speaker then notes that there are flowers that only bloom in darkness, ending with a description of tending to their seeds. While the poem focuses on the natural imagery of flowers, fruits, and light, it is clear that Cullen is depicting a struggle for recognition. The racial element of this is apparent in the way he characterizes the value of darkness. The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, with two separate rhyme schemes for each stanza. It follows an ABBA rhyme scheme in the first stanza and an AABBCC rhyme scheme in the second. Following the traditional structure of this form, Cullen breaks the poem into a statement of a problem and its potential response. This allows him to shift mood in the second stanza.
