The Ballad
"Incident" is written in a ballad form, which is an incredibly old form of poetry. It's also an incredibly popular one—you can find ballads written by folks like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dickinson all over your Norton Anthology (also, all over Shmoop!).
The first rule of ballad form is that you don't talk about ballad form. (Okay, sorry—bad joke.) The first rule of ballad form is actually that it has a ballad meter, which means that it alternates lines of iambic tetrameter (eight-syllable lines made up of iambs) with lines of iambic trimeter (six- syllable lines made up of iambs).
Ready for the plain ol' English version of that? It means that, when you hear it read out loud, the poem sounds like this:
daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM
daDUM daDUM daDUM
daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM
daDUM daDUM daDUM
Don't believe us? Here's what the first two lines of the poem sound like when you read them out loud.
Once riding in old Baltimore
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee
Now, there is a common variation that we find in ballad meter that Cullen takes advantage of when he writes "Incident." Check it out: sometimes he throws an extra syllable into the second and fourth lines of each stanza. For example, the lines "From May until December" and "That's all that I remember" each have 7 syllables (not 6). This is a pretty regular occurrence in ballads, so don't let it stress you out. Just calm down and breathe into this paper bag; we'll get through this.
The next rule of the ballad is that it rhymes—particularly, that the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme. (Sometimes the first and third lines don't rhyme, sometimes they do). So, in "Incident" we've got three pairs of rhyming words: "glee" and me," "bigger" and "nigger," and finally "December" and "remember," and the rhyme scheme looks like this: ABCB.
The final rule of the ballad is that its stanzas are quatrains, which just means that each stanza has four lines.
So why go so Old School with this form and meter? By writing "Incident" as a ballad, Cullen takes this very old form and updates it for the twentieth century by writing about contemporary topics like racism. In doing so, he both connects it with a long history of the ballad (we're lookin' at you Wordsworth) and with the concerns of his particular moment in history. He also seems to subtly connect the past, where racism was accepted as commonplace, with the speaker's present, where it's a shocking slap in the face. In this way, the poem is pointing out that ignorance and hatred may not be such relics of the past after all. Slam dunk, Countee.