Heritage

“Heritage” is comprised of rhyming couplets, which means that pairs of adjoining lines rhyme, creating an AABBCC pattern. There are 64 couplets in the poem totaling 128 lines. Most lines contain seven syllables, with an irregular metric structure (accents are differently distributed in different lines).

The poem’s seven stanzas follow a careful trajectory. The first stanza offers the speaker’s central question about the meaning of Africa. In the second stanza, the speaker describes their reluctant obsession with African sounds and images. The third stanza shows their efforts to distance themself from Africa and its connotations, but the fourth stanza reveals that these have a powerful subconscious impact on the speaker. The brief fifth stanza is transitional and introduces the theme of religion. The sixth stanza finally reveals the speaker’s deeper concerns behind the obsession with Africa: how to cope with grief and anger caused by the history of slavery and racism. Finally, the seventh stanza expresses the speaker’s conclusion that they must keep these dangerous feelings at bay, or be swallowed alive. Their fantasy of Africa invokes these feelings but also keeps the feelings safely romanticized. Thus, the poem’s structure reflects the mental process through which the speaker maintains a very tentative control of potentially harmful emotions and impulses.