Poem of the Day: ‘Saturday’s Child’

In today’s Poem of the Day, the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen (1903–1946) inverts all the old proverbs, truisms, fairy tales, and mythologies surrounding the birth of a child. For his speaker, the conventional imagery of good fortune and anointing — the silver spoon, the mysterious star, the good fairies gathered with their gifts — forms an alien language, a language he must borrow and transform in order to locate himself in the world. We could understand the ballad form here as another borrowing from tradition, a way for an outsider to place himself inside — except that what the ballad traditionally does is to tell bad-luck stories, not fairy tales. For Cullen the form represents a poetic birthright. “Saturday’s child works hard for a living,” says the nursery rhyme. This origin story tells us why.