Cullen's Yet Do I Marvel
The Joy of a Singing Black Poet
Countée Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel” is an Elizabethan sonnet with the traditional rime scheme in the first two quatrains, ABABCDCD, and the ending couplet, GG, but with a variation in the rime scheme of the third quatrain. Instead of the traditional EFEF, Cullen inserts two couplets EEFF.
First Quatrain: “I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind”
The speaker addresses the issue of God’s mystery by asserting that he believes “God is good, well-meaning, kind,”—a different conclusion from those who argue that the mind of God is unknowable and therefore suspect that God is evil because He allows evil to exist.
The speaker does not “doubt” that God could easily explain why he permits certain unexplainable things to continue, but God does not “quibble,” as the limited human does. Because God includes the entirety of the cosmos, the profundity and enormity of such a Being is obviously unfathomable to the limited human mind.
But the speaker, whose intuition is more advanced than those who “quibble” about the nature of God, is able to take the hints that are plain for all who will look to see. Thus, the speaker knows that God has a reason for allowing the “little buried mole” to continue “blind,” and God also knows why he allows “flesh that mirrors Him [to] some day die.”
Second Quatrain: “Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus“
If He chose to “quibble,” God could also explain why people are tantalized and deceive. He could also explain the real reason for the Sisyphean struggle, and the speaker is convinced that after God’s explanation, mankind would realize that the purpose is not “merely brute caprice.”
Third Quatrain: “Inscrutable His ways are, and immune”
The speaker then discloses, “inscrutable His ways are,” and that they cannot be categorized “by a mind too strewn / With petty cares.” The minds of most human beings, including the philosophical thinkers who have concluded that God is evil or God does not exist at all, are included in the speaker’s description.
Those with “petty cares” littering their minds are unable to “slightly understand / What awful brain compels His awful hand.” The term “awful” here employs the older meaning of awe-inspiring, or awesome. Because humankind is so full of itself, it finds true understand of God next to impossible.
Couplet: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing”
The speaker then offers a compelling notion that completes his opening claims that God is “good, well-meaning, kind.” The speaker, who is the poet writing in the first half of the 20th century, knows that the status of black folk is held quite low by much of society, and therefore little is expected from them.
They are thought to be lazy, dimwitted, and suitable only for manual labor. Some philosophers thought that God’s relationship with black folk had been especially worthy of equivocation. How could a kind, well-meaning God allow some of His children to be held in such low regard by so many of His other children?
But this speaker has a different take from those who want to equivocate about God. If God is so unjust with black folk, why would be allow “this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing”? The speaker is implying that such a positive example of a singing, black poet should offer evidence that many thinkers need to re-evaluate their quibbling position about their Creator.
Countée Cullen
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