Countee Cullen: Should we marvel or scorn?

Cullen’s poem “Yet I Do Marvel” (ANTH 727) is an incredibly well-polished sonnet. Whether or not you feel that Cullen should have been attempting to emulate “white” forms of poetry during the Harlem Renaissance is an entirely different story, and is often highly debated, as evidenced in Helene Johnson’s satirical poem: “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem.” Like all sonnets, “Yet I Do Marvel” is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, with two quatrains (abab, cdcd) and one sestet (eeffgg) divided into seven rhymes. The two quatrains use a similar metrical pattern and the octave as a whole allowed Cullen to make several observations about God and His relationship with man while also presenting the speaker’s question: why is there evil in the world if God is ultimately good? The sestet then offers the speaker, who seems indistinguishable from Cullen, the chance to draw conclusions from his observations. While no particular audience is addressed, the speaker voices his own faith in God, despite having witnessed death, violence, and destruction in the world. Cullen uses the clever device of consistent meter throughout the poem, perhaps alluding to the unwavering faith of the speaker. While he cannot understand why a just God would allow such terrible occurrences in the world, as evidenced in line 9 with “Inscrutable His ways are,” the speaker still “doubt[s] not God is good, well-meaning, kind” (line 1). The speaker wonders about the horrible punishments inflicted upon Tantalus and Sisyphus, two figures of Greek mythology alluded to in the sonnet that are perpetually tortured (lines 5-7). The speaker then decided that only God knows the answers to the speaker’s questions and that humans have “mind[s] too strewn/ with petty cares to slightly understand” (lines 10-11) His ways. Readers do not realize that the speaker is black until the final line: “To make a poet black, and bid him sing!”  this last line, the speaker was simply an anonymous human, but the voice takes on a prouder tone when it reveals its blackness, as if it were miraculous that one could be made both a black man and a poet. I find it interesting that while this poem certainly distinguishes between whites and blacks, the delayed revealing of the race of the speaker seems to unify humanity in its common fears of death, questions of the universe, and potential doubts of God or a higher power.