Cullen, Countee. "Countee Cullen." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 242-51. Print.
Although many of these poems were in a simpler vein than the ones by Toomer, they still held an air of sorrow that was hard to pass over. I particularly liked the one entitled “Yet Do I Marvel”, not only because it questions God and the Bible (although in a roundabout way), but because it seems to encompass much of what the rest of the poems are trying to get at: a kind of hopeless resignation to the state of things tangled in a fire of pride that won’t quite die.
“Yet Do I Marvel” is the kind of poem that can be read only a couple of different ways. One way is the literal meaning: Cullen is a religious man who, despite everything the African race has been through, keeps his faith in God. The other reading, and the one I am more partial to, is that Cullen is being extremely sarcastic and demonizing God for ignoring the African plight.
He begins the poem by saying that, if one were to ask God (or, rather, were God to take the time to explain) why such horrible things are commonplace in nature (death, blindness, doom, and so on), God would surely explain in detail why he made things so. He then turns around and says that God is not susceptible to catechism (extensive questioning) of a mind too absorbed in itself (i.e. Man), which basically means that God could explain himself to Man, but he won’t. Interestingly, Cullen drops the veil of sarcasm and outright calls God awful: “what awful brain compels His awful hand”. I maintain that the poem could be taken in either a positive or sarcastic way; remember that “awful”, in its more literal sense, simply means “full of awe”, something that can easily be attributed to God.
The final couplet is a bit more lighthearted. It adds one more of God’s “awful” deeds – the creation of a black poet. In the shadow of the other things mentioned, perhaps Cullen is trying to poke a bit of fun at those who find nothing but sorrow in their situation as black Americans. He’s saying that there are worse things than being black by putting ethnicity in contrast to the aforementioned death, blindness, etc. On the other hand, though, it can be interpreted as Cullen talking very specifically about himself (since he is a poet). The reason he finds this “curious” is a bit unclear, but I believe it has something to do with giving a voice to the black race in spite of all of the other horrible things attributed to God. It’s kind of like Cullen is saying “thanks a lot, God,” for giving blacks such a meek and subtle tool when it was well within His power to simply eradicate the problems of racism altogether.
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