Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

Cullen’s exact birthplace is unknown, but in 1918, at the age of 15, Countee LeRoy was adopted by Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the minster to the largest church congregation in Harlem.

Cullen kept his finger on the pulse of Harlem during the 1920s while he attended New York University and then a graduate program at Harvard. His poetry became popular during his student years, especially his prize-winning poem “The Ballad of a Brown Girl.” In 1925, he published his first volume of poetry entitled Color. Within the next few years, Cullen became well-known, publishing several books and winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 (to write poetry in France).

At first, Cullen was critical of Langston Hughes’ poetry, writing that, in using jazz rhythms in his poetry, Hughes was erecting barriers between race instead of removing them. In his own poetry, Cullen sought to erase these boundaries and took traditionalist poets, such as Keats and A.E. Housman, as models for his own poetry. However, despite his criticisms of other black poets, the majority of Cullen’s own verses confront racial issues.

By the 1930s, Cullen’s influence had waned, though he continued to publish prolifically, including novels, a collection of poems for children, the autobiography of his cat, and an adaption of his novel God Sends Sunday into a Broadway musical.

-bio via Song of America

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, September 19th, 2024.
0:10.5	Today's poem comes from County Cullen, major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, poet, and playwright,
0:17.9	and the poem is called, Yet do I marvel?
0:25.4	I'll read it once, say a few things about it, and then read it one more time.
0:27.6	Yet do I marvel.
0:33.9	I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
0:38.8	and did he stoop to quibble, could tell why the little buried mole continues blind.
0:45.8	Why flesh that mirrors him must someday die? Make plain the reason tortured tantalus is baited by the fickle fruit. Declair, if merely, brute caprice, dooms Sisyphus to struggle up a never-ending
0:52.2	stare. Inscrutable his ways are, and immune to catechism by a mind too strewn with petty cares
0:59.0	to slightly understand what awful brain compels his awful hand.
1:04.6	Yet do I marvel at this curious thing, to make a poet black and bid him sing.
1:30.4	This poem is a sonnet and true to form. A sonnet always presents some issue or a question or a puzzle and then flips or inverts that issue, solves that puzzle, answers that question, or perhaps just deepens it.
1:33.6	And that seems to be what's happening here.
1:48.2	The poem begins actually with a sense of certainty or assurance and then undoes a bit of that assurance or shows the finitude or the limitations of that assurance in the poem's final lines. The speaker begins somewhat confidently, rather confidently. I doubt not. God is good,
1:57.1	well-meaning, kind. And then he goes on to offer a litany of puzzles. Many of them are puzzles
2:09.7	of suffering, not all but many. Why do these things happen? There's something of the book of Job here.
2:19.5	And while many of us find it easier to identify with Job at the beginning of the book of Job, raising our hands to heaven and expressing our inability to comprehend why certain things are happening, that's not quite the tone that the poet strikes, that the speaker strikes.
2:37.6	He says, these are all things that I can deal with.
2:41.8	I can handle.
2:42.5	I assume there's some good explanation for them.
2:46.6	And in truth, many of them even come from Greek mythology.
2:52.8	It's not so much a theological problem or questioned at all as a mythological one.
	...

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