"Heritage" and "Runagate Runagate"

I was really struck by the last two stanzas of Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage.” I think he hones in on a theme we’ve mentioned before: some blacks feel a certain level of falseness inherent in their Christian worship. The speaker of the poem seems to express a sense of remorse, misguidance, and disconnectedness. He wishes that he had a black God to worship so that he might feel more connected to his God. The speaker seems skeptical that his God’s plight is comparable to his own. The speaker also seems to privately worship his own “heathen” Gods. Perhaps this makes him feel more connected to his African past and the African landscape that he spent the first several stanzas describing.

I really liked the first stanza of Robert Hayden’s “Runagate Runagate.” The repetition of words like “darkness,” “pursuing,” “night,” “beckoning,” and “going” creates tension. This tension is also reflected in the lack of punctuation. It makes the reader feel breathless, nervous, and tense when reading the long, run-on description of a secret flight to freedom. It’s comparable to the way Sterling A. Brown’s “Southern Road” conjured images of a chain gang simply by the way the reader was forced to stop and say, “hunh.” I think that the way “Runagate Runagate” looks on the page also adds to the confusion and flightiness—it’s very scattered and frenzied.