Countee Cullen Quotes

“Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!”

Though his throat is bare, By death defiled, Song labored there And bore a child.” When the dreadful Ax Rives me apart, When the sharp wedge cracks My arid heart, Turn to this book Of the singing me For a springtime look At the wintry tree. Say, “Thus it was weighed With flower and fruit, Ere the Ax was laid Unto its root. Though the blows fall free On a gnarled trunk now, Once he was a tree With a blossomy bough.” _Color_ _Yet Do I Marvel_ I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind, And did He stoop to quibble could tell why The little buried mole continues blind, Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die, Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus To struggle up a never-ending stair. Inscrutable His ways are, and immune To catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understand What awful brain compels His awful hand. Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing! _A Song of Praise_ (_For one who praised his lady’s being fair._) You have not heard my love’s dark throat, Slow-fluting like a reed, Release the perfect golden note She caged there for my need. Her walk is like the replica Of some barbaric dance Wherein the soul of Africa Is winged with arrogance. And yet so light she steps across The ways her sure feet pass, She does not dent the smoothest moss Or bend the thinnest grass. My love is dark as yours is fair, Yet lovelier I hold her Than listless maids with pallid hair, And blood that’s thin and colder. You-proud-and-to-be-pitied one, Gaze on her and despair; Then seal your lips until the sun Discovers one as fair. _Brown Boy to Brown Girl_ (_Remembrance on a hill_) (_For Yolande_) “As surely as I hold your hand in mine, As surely as your crinkled hair belies The enamoured sun pretending that he dies While still he loiters in its glossy shine, As surely as I break the slender line That spider linked us with, in no least wise Am I uncertain that these alien skies Do not our whole life measure and confine.

“Your love to me was like an unread book . . .”

Countee Cullen

“So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.”

Countee Cullen

“The play is done, the crowds depart; and see / That twisted tortured thing hung from a tree, / Swart victim of a newer Calvary.”

Countee Cullen

“[W]e have always resented the natural inclination of most white people to demand spirituals the moment it is known that a Negro is about to sing. So often the request has seemed to savor of the feeling that we could do this and this alone.”

Countee Cullen

“The key to all strange things is in thy heart..../ My spirit has come home, that sailed the doubtful seas.”

Countee Cullen

“My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.”

Countee Cullen

“There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call the breaks. In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things -- read and write -- and wait.”