Countee Cullen

Yet Do I Marvel

I DOUBT not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

God's hypothetical defense

"Stoop to quibble" = if God lowered himself to argue details. Cullen frames the whole poem as God's silence—He *could* explain, but doesn't.

And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus

Greek torture myths

Tantalus (fruit he can't reach) and Sisyphus (boulder rolling downhill forever) are eternal punishments. Both involve futile repetition—notice what that might parallel.

Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.

Sonnet turn

The volta—where Italian sonnets pivot. First 12 lines accept God's mystery. Then "Yet" pivots to the one thing Cullen *can't* accept.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

The impossible task

Final line lands on the paradox: how do you create beauty while living under American racism? "Bid him sing" = commanded to, not invited to.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Sonnet's Trap Door

This is an Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet doing a magic trick. The form requires 8 lines of setup (octave), then a turn (volta) at line 9, then 6 lines of resolution (sestet). Cullen follows the blueprint perfectly—until he doesn't.

Lines 1-12 build what looks like a conventional theodicy poem: "I don't question God's goodness, even though bad things happen." He stacks examples—moles born blind, human mortality, Tantalus and Sisyphus suffering forever. The tone is humble, even submissive: "Inscrutable His ways are," our minds are too "petty" to understand God's "awful brain." Standard 1920s religious poetry.

Then line 13 detonates everything. "Yet do I marvel"—the volta comes *late*, at line 13 instead of 9, and it reverses the entire argument. Cullen doesn't marvel at moles or Greek myths. He marvels at "this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!" The polite theological meditation was a setup. The real subject is American racism, and suddenly "inscrutable" reads as bitter irony.

The form itself makes the argument. Cullen uses the most European, most classical poetic structure (Italian sonnet, Greek mythology, Christian theology) to say: the cruelest paradox isn't ancient—it's being Black in America and expected to create art. The sonnet's elegance is the point. He's proving he can write "their" poetry while naming what "they" won't acknowledge.

Harlem Renaissance, 1925

CONTEXT Cullen published this in 1925, peak Harlem Renaissance. He was 22, already famous, and caught in the era's central debate: should Black poets write "racial poetry" or "universal poetry"? White critics praised Cullen as "a credit to his race" when he wrote formal verse about Greek myths—the implication being he'd transcended Blackness. Langston Hughes pushed back, arguing Black poets should write about Black life in Black vernacular.

"Yet Do I Marvel" is Cullen's answer: the form IS the content. He writes an impeccable Italian sonnet to prove he can, then uses it to say the game is rigged. The poem enacts its own argument—look how perfectly I perform European poetic tradition, and notice how that doesn't save me from being "a poet black" in a country that sees that as a contradiction.

The final line's brilliance is "bid him sing." Not "let him" or "invite him"—bid, as in command. Like Sisyphus commanded to push the boulder, like Tantalus commanded to reach for fruit. The Black poet is commanded to create beauty within a system designed to destroy him, and that's the "curious thing" Cullen can't accept. The mole's blindness is natural. Sisyphus is mythology. But American racism is a choice, and the poem won't pretend otherwise.