The poem begins with the speaker "riding through old Baltimore." The phrase "old Baltimore" has a couple of possible interpretations:
- On the one hand, "old" sometimes suggests a sense of familiarity and affection (as in "good old such-and-such"). In this way, the speaker is perhaps expressing that he feels comfortable and happy in Baltimore.
- "Old Baltimore" is also another name for the western part of the city, a part that, due to intense segregation, housed a large percentage of Baltimore's Black population in Cullen's time.
As he's riding through this part of town on a streetcar, the speaker describes himself as being "Heart-filled, head-filled with glee." In other words, his head and heart are overflowing with happiness. He's having the time of his life, excited to be taking this trip through the city.
The parallelism and alliteration of "Heart-filled, head-filled" evokes the intensity of the speaker's joy and suggests that he's not just emotionally happy, but also deeply curious (his "head" is also filled with "glee"). All this excitement and wonder implies that this trip is the speaker's first through this part of Baltimore, and maybe even his first trip away from home.
The speaker isn't just saying he was happy, either; readers can feel it in the buoyancy of the poem's rhythm. "Incident" features something called ballad meter, meaning its lines alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. An iamb is a poetic foot with an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern; tetrameter means there are four of these iambs per line, while trimeter means there are just three.
Once ri- | ding in | old Balt- | imore,
Heart-filled, | head-filled | with glee,
As readers can see, of course, the meter isn't totally steady here. The speaker opens line 2 with a pair of spondees (feet with a stressed-stressed pattern), and some readers might actually scan the first foot of line one as a spondee as well ("Once ri-"). All these extra stresses emphasize the speaker's intense joy and excitement, which can't be contained by the poem's form.