The Full Text of “Incident”
1Once riding in old Baltimore,
2 Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
3I saw a Baltimorean
4 Keep looking straight at me.
5Now I was eight and very small,
6 And he was no whit bigger,
7And so I smiled, but he poked out
8 His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."
9I saw the whole of Baltimore
10 From May until December;
11Of all the things that happened there
12 That's all that I remember.
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“Incident” Introduction
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Countee Cullen, one of the best known poets of the Harlem Renaissance, published "Incident" in his first collection, Color, in 1925. The poem recalls a childhood "incident" in which the speaker's life is forever altered when another child uses a racist slur against him in public. The poem's carefree beginning contrasts with the sudden, horrific reality of this moment, which intrudes on the speaker's otherwise happy memory of this time in his life. Through this "incident," the poem illustrates the visceral horror and lasting impact of racism.
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“Incident” Summary
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One time, while riding around old Baltimore, my heart and head overflowing with happiness, I noticed that there was someone from the city who kept staring right at me.
See, I was only eight years old and quite little, and this other kid wasn't much larger than I was, so I smiled at him—but he stuck his tongue out at me and called me the n-word.
I got to see all of Baltimore over the rest of that year, but whatever else might have happened while I was in the city, that moment is the only thing that stuck with me.
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“Incident” Themes
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Racism and Lost Innocence
The poem's speaker recalls an “incident” from a childhood trip to Baltimore in which another little boy calls him the n-word. This early brush with the reality of racism overshadows the rest of the speaker's trip and remains vivid in his memory for years to come. In showing how this moment shatters the speaker's joyful innocence and reshapes his experience of the world, the poem illustrates the lasting pain and trauma of coming face to face with racism as a child.
Before this “incident,” the speaker’s head and heart are “filled with glee.” He's excited and overjoyed to be "riding in old Baltimore"—a trip the poem suggests is the speaker's first away from home and, it follows, away from a certain level of protection from the racism of the outside world.
There's no mention of race at all until the poem's eighth line, in fact, suggesting how little importance the speaker grants it as a child. All he cares about upon seeing another little boy is the fact that this other child isn't any "bigger" than the speaker and is from the city (making him an exotic "Baltimorean"). The happy speaker never mentions this boy's race, and sees no reason not to extend a friendly gesture despite the fact that, as readers will soon learn, this other child isn't Black.
In response, this other child sticks out his tongue and calls the speaker a terrible racial slur. Though the speaker never says exactly how he feels right then, the fact that he remembers nothing else of the trip apart from this "incident" speaks volumes. It's clear that this slur crushes the speaker's previously wondrous spirit by alerting him to the reality of prejudice. And even though he sees “the whole of Baltimore” during this trip, the racist “incident” is the only thing he remembers of it. Confronting the jarring reality of racism upends the speaker's entire world, as the speaker realizes that the place he was so excited to explore is filled with baseless hatred towards him.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Incident”
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Lines 1-2
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,The poem begins with the speaker "riding through old Baltimore." The phrase "old Baltimore" has a couple of possible interpretations:
- On the one hand, "old" sometimes suggests a sense of familiarity and affection (as in "good old such-and-such"). In this way, the speaker is perhaps expressing that he feels comfortable and happy in Baltimore.
- "Old Baltimore" is also another name for the western part of the city, a part that, due to intense segregation, housed a large percentage of Baltimore's Black population in Cullen's time.
As he's riding through this part of town on a streetcar, the speaker describes himself as being "Heart-filled, head-filled with glee." In other words, his head and heart are overflowing with happiness. He's having the time of his life, excited to be taking this trip through the city.
The parallelism and alliteration of "Heart-filled, head-filled" evokes the intensity of the speaker's joy and suggests that he's not just emotionally happy, but also deeply curious (his "head" is also filled with "glee"). All this excitement and wonder implies that this trip is the speaker's first through this part of Baltimore, and maybe even his first trip away from home.
The speaker isn't just saying he was happy, either; readers can feel it in the buoyancy of the poem's rhythm. "Incident" features something called ballad meter, meaning its lines alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. An iamb is a poetic foot with an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern; tetrameter means there are four of these iambs per line, while trimeter means there are just three.
Once ri- | ding in | old Balt- | imore,
Heart-filled, | head-filled | with glee,As readers can see, of course, the meter isn't totally steady here. The speaker opens line 2 with a pair of spondees (feet with a stressed-stressed pattern), and some readers might actually scan the first foot of line one as a spondee as well ("Once ri-"). All these extra stresses emphasize the speaker's intense joy and excitement, which can't be contained by the poem's form.
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Lines 3-4
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
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Lines 5-8
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger." -
Lines 9-12
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
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“Incident” Symbols
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The Baltimorean
The Baltimorean represents racist society in general. Though the speaker is describing a very specific moment here, the whole "incident" can be thought of as the speaker's painful introduction to the harsh reality of racial prejudice. The speaker's confrontation with this one racist child shakes him to his core, and that's because the Baltimorean represents so much more than just one racist child. In confronting the Baltimorean, the speaker is also confronting the knowledge that part of society hates him simply because of the color of his skin.
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“Incident” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Consonance
"Incident" features clear, straightforward language that feels intimate and conversational. As such, it doesn't use many poetic devices that draw attention to themselves, as consonance, alliteration, and assonance do. That said, there are moments of each sonic device in the poem that add to its bouncy rhythm. Combined with the poem's steady meter and rhyme scheme, these devices create pleasant music in the poem that's at odds with what actually happens.
Let's focus on the poem's use of consonance, the broadest of these three sonic devices, first. In the first stanza, repetition of /d/, /l/, /h/, and /k/ sounds reflects the speaker's joy and wonder as he rides through Baltimore. The consonance is pretty subtle, but it still adds a gentle musicality to these lines that evokes the speaker's happiness:
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking [...]In the second stanza, there is significantly less going on in terms of consonance until lines 7-8. These then feature a mixture of hissing /s/ and sharp /k/ and /t/ sounds that add harshness to the "incident" of the poem's title:
[...] he poked out
His tongue, and called [...]The spiky sounds here evoke the shock and horror of the little boy's actions and make them stand out all the more starkly in the poem.
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Enjambment
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Juxtaposition
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“Incident” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Glee
- Baltimorean
- whit
Glee-
Delight or happiness.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Incident”
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Form
"Incident" is a 12-line poem divided into three quatrains, or four-line stanzas. It's also a ballad, and as such uses a very specific meter and rhyme scheme that provides a certain jaunty and rhythmic feel.
A ballad is an old form of English-language poetry often used to tell stories. And given that English-language poetry was traditionally dominated by white people, those stories weren't exactly diverse. In using the ballad form, then, Cullen is tapping into a longstanding literary legacy and making it his own, insisting that Black people's stories are just as worthy of commemoration in poetry as anyone else's.
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Meter
"Incident" is written in something called ballad meter, well known for its use in Christian church hymns. This means that the poem has alternating lines of iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, feet that follow an unstressed-stressed beat pattern) and iambic trimeter (lines of three iambs). For a perfect examples of this, take lines 3-4:
I saw | a Bal- | timor- | ean
Keep look- | ing straight | at me.In using this meter, Cullen is again tapping into English poetic tradition. Iambic meter has a bouncy rhythm that mimics the way people actually speaker, and its use here (along with the poem's steady rhyme scheme) adds a strangely light-hearted feel to a poem whose subject is actually quite devastating. The disconnect between the poem's light and conversational rhythm and the speaker's heartbreak emphasizes the cruel nature of racism, which robs the speaker of the memory of an otherwise joyful day and leaves him instead with the vivid recollection of this "incident."
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Rhyme Scheme
As is typical for ballads, each stanza in the poem follows the rhyme scheme:
ABCB
The even-numbered lines rhyme, while the odd-numbered lines don't. The ballad's strict rhyme scheme adds to the poem's lighthearted, jaunty feel. The steady, clear end rhymes often make ballads feel a bit like a nursery rhyme or a church hymn. In this way, the poem's form butts up uncomfortably against its content. That is, the seriousness of the subject here might come as a surprise given the poem's lighthearted rhythm. Upon reaching the end of the second stanza, the reader might experience the speaker's shock and devastation of having something beautiful ruined by an act of bigotry.
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“Incident” Speaker
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The speaker is a Black person looking back on a racist "incident" that happened in childhood, specifically when he was "eight and very small." (Note that the speaker is never gendered in the poem; we've used male pronouns throughout this given the speaker's resemblance to the poet, Countee Cullen. It's not necessary to read the speaker as male to understand the poem.)
The fact that the speaker seems to be much older in the actual telling of the poem speaks to just how much this event has stuck out his mind; years later, it's the only thing the speaker remembers from this nearly year-long trip to Baltimore.
There's a harsh line in the speaker's life before and after this moment: he can still remember how happy he was leading up to the incident, yet everything that comes after gets tainted by the little boy's slur. The event seemingly opened the speaker's eyes to the immense hatred he'd face in life because of his race, and thus has stayed with him ever since.
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“Incident” Setting
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The events in the poem take place on a streetcar in Baltimore, Maryland, presumably around the time Cullen wrote the poem in the 1920s. The speaker's reference to "old Baltimore" might be a simple term of affection (as in "good old Baltimore"), or might be a reference to the specific district of "Old Baltimore" (which today is known as the "Old West Baltimore Historic District"). Either way, readers get the sense that the young speaker was travelling away from home for the first time when this terrible "incident" occurred.
The poem itself, however, seems to take place many years later, with the now adult speaker looking back on a traumatic moment he was never able to forget. This distance between the speaker and the "incident" speaks to just how strongly the moment affected him.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Incident”
Literary Context
Countee Cullen's work combined the traditions and techniques of traditional English literature (such as the ballad form used here in "Incident" or the sonnet form of "Yet Do I Marvel") with the everyday concerns of Black people and the reality of racism in America. Color, the collection in which "Incident" first appeared, was one of the major works that launched the Harlem Renaissance, and early 20th-century celebration of Black arts, culture, and politics that began in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Harlem in New York City.
Cullen was influenced from an early age by the great English Romantic poets of the 18th century such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, and John Keats, whose poetry celebrated the natural world and the power of the individual. Despite writing during the rise of Modernism (which saw poets sharply breaking with rigid forms and experimenting with language and free verse), Cullen stuck to English poetic convention, both to prove that it was possible for a Black poet do so and simply because that's what he liked and had been formally educated in.
Cullen called for other Black artists to do the same, and while many Black thinkers and political leaders celebrated his work, he also lost favor among others for this appearance of catering to white audiences. Despite his cautioning other Black poets to steer away from writing too explicitly about race for fear of alienating such audiences, however, poems like "Incident" remain a powerful testament to the horrors of racial prejudice.
Historical Context
Cullen came of age in the 1920s, a time when racial segregation was still legal in many parts of the United States. In response to the lack of jobs and open discrimination of Jim Crow Laws in the South, many Black people began moving North with the belief that conditions would be more tolerable. This mass movement would come to be known as the Great Migration. A huge number of Black people settled in Harlem, New York, and thereabouts, leading to the Harlem Renaissance, a resurgence of Black artistic and intellectual life.
Though not always as overt in its racism as the South, the North was still extremely prejudiced. In response to the steady stream of Black people migrating to northern cities, many of those cities enacted racist housing legislation that ensured Black and white neighborhoods would remain separate.
"Incident" subtly references the reality of such segregation. "Old Baltimore," or West Baltimore, is a historic Maryland district that, by Cullen's day, had transformed into a predominantly Black neighborhood and housed a large percentage of the city's Black population. In this way, "old Baltimore" mirrored Harlem: as Black people were crammed together into undesirable old neighborhoods, their community and culture flourished even while their economic situation didn't—like Harlem, West Baltimore was an epicenter of Black culture and politics.
While Cullen lived in Harlem from the age of nine, it isn't entirely clear where he was born or where he lived prior to this time. The most likely options are Louisville, Kentucky, New York City, and Baltimore. In any case, it seems highly likely that he, like the speaker of this poem, spent some time in Baltimore as a child, and that the poem is based on an "incident" from his own life.
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More “Incident” Resources
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External Resources
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Cullen's Life and Work — A thorough introduction to Cullen by the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poem Out Loud — Listen to a recording of the poem read by Teyuna T. Darris.
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Rita Dove on "Incident" — Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove reads and discusses "Incident" by Countee Cullen in this 2012 interview.
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Old Baltimore — An article for Baltimore Magazine that connects the 2015 police killing of Freddie Gray and subsequent civil unrest to the city's long history of racial segregation.
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The Harlem Renaissance — A brief overview of the Harlem Renaissance.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Countee Cullen
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