Sonnets and Agonizing Seeds
Seed metaphors appear in three sonnets by African American poets during the two decades of literary optimism of the 1920s and 1930s often referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. Not seeds of hatred but seeds of hope and possible flourishing. Countee Cullen’s “From the Dark Tower” (1924) tells of artistic yearnings that will not always be thwarted by social injustice:
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.[1]
“From the Dark Tower” is one of Cullen’s most anthologized sonnets, reaching back to the Shakespearean tradition of authorial immortality, which Cullen deploys ironically to indict the physical and emotional suffering of Jim Crow that prevent him from flowering as a poet. Eugene Collier calls it “a restrained, dignified, poignant work, influenced in form by Keats and Shelley,” but she misses the anger implicit in his evocation of Shakespeare.[2] Cullen had studied and admired both Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay in college (Amy Lowell’s widely praised biography of Keats had just been published), but Cullen’s poem contends with English tradition more broadly.
Cullen’s first quatrain opens with an allusion to biblical slavery; the second quatrain focuses on suffering under slavery.[3] The first couplet in the sestet praises blackness; the second alludes to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), notably the line “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,” near lines about darkness and a mute Milton.[4] Allusions to Gray’s “Elegy” appear regularly in African American poetry. Cullen will make the point about the agony and futility of black artistry more strongly in his more famous sonnet, “Yet Do I Marvel.” Here, he is contending with sonnet traditions that promote suffering to achieve spiritual awakening to argue that abjection can also destroy the drive to create. Cullen’s “agonizing seeds” are his poetic works that both agonize him and agonize the formal tradition in which he situates himself and demands a voice.
Cullen appreciated the sonnet form and anthologized the young Sterling Brown’s sonnet “Salutamus,” which also includes seeds, in his collection Caroling Dusk (1927):
— O Gentlemen the time of Life is short. Henry IV, Part I
The bitterness of days like these we know;
Much, much we know, yet cannot understand
What was our crime that such a searing brand
Not of our choosing, keeps us hated so.
Despair and disappointment only grow,
Whatever seeds are planted from our hand,
What though some roads wind through a gladsome land?
It is a gloomy path that we must go.
And yet we know relief will come some day
For these seared breasts; and lads as brave again
Will plant and find a fairer crop than ours.
It must be due our hearts, our minds, our powers;
These are the beacons to blaze out the way.
We must plunge onward; onward, gentlemen. . . .
Brown’s epigraph is a line spoken by Henry Percy, “Hotspur,” one of the manliest (if unsuccessful) heroes in English literature. Using an Italian rhyme scheme (rather than the expected Shakespearean), Brown’s sonnet speaker speaks in first person plural, as a spokesman for a hated, branded people. The opening couplet, “The bitterness of days like these we know;/ Much, much we know, yet cannot understand” evokes the opening couplet of Paul Dunbar’s sonnet “Douglass” (“Ah, Douglass, we have fall’n on evil days, / Such days as thou, not even thou didst know”). Brown’s sonnet speaker is, like Dunbar’s, mournful, all-seeing, and determined; yet resolute, in the manner of Claude McKay’s sonnet, “If We Must Die,” without the outrage. Brown’s seeds recall Cullen’s seeds, as well as the dark path from Dunbar’s sonnet, “Slow Through the Dark.” Brown’s sestet appears to turn to optimism. If in the octave the speaker differentiates knowledge from understanding, in the sestet, the speaker knows that the future will be fruitful. He speaks for faith in future generations who will “plunge onward.” And yet, optimism is tempered by knowledge that Shakespeare’s Hotspur failed in battle.
Langston Hughes too tried his hand at sonnets, publishing several in Opportunity in the 1930s, though he did not include them in his collected works. Arnold Rampersad describes Hughes striving to overcome writers block in the late 1920s and trying everything he could, including sonnets. “For a poet of Hughes’s rhythmic originality, however, this was a backward step in almost every way,” Rampersad argues, rationalizing that “perhaps it was a class exercise for his course in the art of poetry.”[5] Yet read alongside the sonnets of Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Cullen, and McKay, Hughes’s “Terminal” (1932) (later published as “Pennsylvania Station”), shows their influence:
The Pennsylvania Station in New York
Is like some vast basilica of old
That towers above the terrors of the dark
As bulwark and protection to the soul.
Now people who are hurrying alone
And those who come in crowds from far away
Pass through this great concourse of steel and stone
To trains, or else from trains out into day.
And as in great basilicas of old
The search was ever for a dream of God,
So here the search is still within each soul
Some seed to find to nourish earthly sod.
Some seed to find that sprouts a holy tree
To glorify the earth — and you — and me. [6]
Using a Shakespearean rhyme scheme, Hughes’s speaker, in the octave, ponders a grand building and those who pass through it. The use of the term “basilica” evokes Classical halls of justice as well as Christian churches, suggesting that the station is protective of legal rights as well as souls. The sestet repeats the comparison to “great basilicas” but expresses a new mood, from hurrying to dreaming and searching. The seeds in Hughes’s sestet again evoke Cullen’s “agonizing seeds,” though in Cullen’s poem the seeds are being tended, not sought for; here the search is for seeds rather than for soil to plant them in.
It is tempting to think of Hughes’s search for seeds as the search for a poetic theme and that Hughes structured that search as a sonnet.
[1] Countee Cullen, “From the Dark Tower.” Color (1925).
[2] Eugenia W. Collier, “I Do Not Marvel, Countee Cullen.” College Language Association Journal 11.1 (1967).
[3] Psalms and Proverbs as well as Galations 6:7–8 and 2 Corinthians 9:6 refer to sowing and reaping.
[4] Thomas Grey “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751).
[5] Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol I 1901–1941. 2nd Ed (Oxford UP 2002) 160.
[6] Opportunity (Feb 1932), p. 52. And later republished as “Pennsylvania Station” in Approach (Spring 1962), p. 4.
