“Incident” is a poem about a childhood memory and the speaker’s effort to make sense of one specific memory among many. On its face, the poem is about a child’s discovery of the everyday, ordinary nature of racism. Cullen makes several rhetorical choices to force the reader to see such events as important rather than trivial.

First of all, Cullen chooses ballad as his form (see: Literary Devices), a form that memorializes either important events or that uses narrative to capture some universal theme. That choice of form signals to the reader that remembering this child’s pain is important enough to write it into the Anglo American literary tradition.

A second significant rhetorical choice Cullen makes is to have the speaker describe this event through retrospection, a form of narrative in which a present-day “I” tells a story about the past “I” to shore up the identity or needs of the present-day “I.” Having an adult speaker recount this encounter makes it clear that even after all these years, the speaker still bears trauma from this encounter, so much so that they’ve lost nearly a year of their childhood.

Cullen was a poet committed to using his art for self-expression but also to bridge the racial divide between Black and white people.