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.  

Saturday’s Child 
by Countee Cullen 

Some are teethed on a silver spoon, 
    With the stars strung for a rattle; 
I cut my teeth as the black raccoon — 
    For implements of battle. 

Some are swaddled in silk and down, 
    And heralded by a star; 
They swathed my limbs in a sackcloth gown 
    On a night that was black as tar. 

For some, godfather and goddame 
    The opulent fairies be; 
Dame Poverty gave me my name, 
    And Pain godfathered me. 

For I was born on Saturday — 
    “Bad time for planting a seed,” 
Was all my father had to say, 
    And, “One mouth more to feed.” 

Death cut the strings that gave me life, 
    And handed me to Sorrow, 
The only kind of middle wife 
    My folks could beg or borrow. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.