lished poems that had appeared in journals such as
THECrisis, FIRE!!, Harper’s Magazine, THENA-
TION,OPPORTUNITY, The Bookman, The Carolina
Magazine,and PALMS.
The volume consisted of five sections: “Color,”
“The Deep in Love,” “At Cambridge,” “Varia,” and
“Juvenilia.” The first section, “Color,” began with
the poem “From the Dark Tower,” a work that re-
called Cullen’s regular column in Opportunityand
that he dedicated to Opportunityeditor CHARLES
S. JOHNSON. The highly evocative poem was both
an exhortation and a lament. The first stanza
began with the promise that “We shall not always
plant while others reap / The golden increment of
bursting fruit.” The speaker went on to assure his
audience that African Americans were not
doomed to perpetual service, literary or otherwise,
for others. “Not everlasting while others sleep /
Shall we beguile their limbs with subtle brute,” he
promised before insisting that “We were not made
eternally to weep.” The opening poem signaled
Cullen’s racial awareness and accommodated some
of his critics who believed that it was in his race
poetry that Cullen conveyed the most powerful
messages. Yet, in the volume, Cullen also veered
away from producing narrowly defined racial pieces
and offered instead a multifaceted set of medita-
tions on art, life, love, and relationships.
A number of poems provided intense perspec-
tives on African Americans and subjected the nar-
rative subjects like “The Brown Girl” to unrelenting
scrutiny. The narrator in the poems often acted as a
heroic advocate but also was given to acting the role
of outraged defender. In “Threnody for a Brown
Girl,” Cullen’s speaker claimed comfort in knowing
that the young woman had become part of a new
world, one that recognized and responded to her
gifts. “Weep not, you who love her,” the speaker in-
structed, “Life who was not loth to trade her / Unto
death, has done / Better than he planned, has made
her / Wise as Solomon. / Now she knows the Why
and Wherefore, / Troublous Whence and Whither, /
Why men strive and sweat, and care for / Bays that
droop and wither” (ll. 1, 25–32). Now the young
woman had gained understanding of racism, social
hierarchies, and social injustice; she knows, asserted
the speaker, “why fevered blisters / Made her dark
hands run / While her favored, fairer sisters / Nei-
ther wrought nor spun” (ll. 41–44). Other poems,
like “Colors” and “The Litany of the Dark People”
celebrated the power of transcendence and faith
that could enable African Americans to overcome
the mean-spirited world in which they lived.
Cullen’s collection of love poems included
personal tributes to Fiona Braithwaite, daughter of
the literary critic WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITH-
WAITE, and to Yolande DuBois, his future wife. In
addition to these, Cullen included poems about
the loss of love such as “To One Who Was Cruel”
or the satirical “In Memoriam,” which critiqued
the notion of loss. The poem suggested that such
pain was unavoidable but noted bitingly that the
speaker realized now that the one who was gone
was “the path I had to take / To find that all / That
lay behind its loops and bends / Was a bare blank
wall” (ll. 1–4). Others, like “A Song of Sour
Grapes” were more direct and offered unflinching
rejection: “I wish your body were in the grave, /
Deep down as a grave may be,” insisted the out-
raged lover, whose tirade concluded with the wish
that “your mother had never borne, / Your father’s
seed to fruit / That meadow rats had gnawed his
corn / Before it gathered root” (ll. 1–2, 9–12).
The section entitled “At Cambridge,” which
Cullen dedicated “With grateful appreciation to
Robert Hillyer,” his former instructor at HARVARD
UNIVERSITY and later a winner of a PULITZER
PRIZE, included eight poems that ranged from clas-
sical lyric to sonnets on the demands of education
and dramatic meditations on confinement. Cullen
had worked closely with Hillyer on the eight
poems that he included in the volume and the
works shed light on the continuing evolution of his
craft and talents.
Herbert Gorman, who had published an en-
thusiastic review of Cullen’s debut volume in 1925,
was delighted to recommend Copper Sunto audi-
ences. In his NEW YORK TIMES review entitled
“Countee Cullen Is a Poet First and a Negro After-
ward,” Gorman suggested that Copper Sun“reveals
a profounder depth than Color” and that the book
was enriched by “a primitive naiveté.” “There are
times,” he observed, “when [Cullen] is the more
obvious negro poet sentimentalizing about himself
and his people, but the admirable aspect of his
work is the direct evidence in Copper Sunthat he
transcends this limitation time and again and be-
comes sheer poet” (NYT,21 August 1927, BR5).Copper Sun 97