Yet Do I Marvel
Countee Cullen
Biographical Sketch:
Countee Cullen (1903 - 1946) was an American poet, one of the finest of the Harlem Renaissance. Cullen’s use of racial themes in his verse was striking at the time. He drew some criticism, however, because he was heavily influenced by the Romanticism of John Keats and preferred to use classical verse forms rather than rely on the rhythms and idioms of his black American heritage.
Paradox
Paradox: Paradox is a statement of apparent contradiction. On a literal level the idea seems impossible, but there is truth in the contradiction.
Countee Cullen's best known poem, "Yet Do I Marvel" (1925), has been as widely misinterpreted as a poem as Cullen has been misunderstood as a poet. The sonnet seems to many readers and critics no more than the lament of a defeated soul, a complaint by a man unable to resolve the dilemma of being black and a poet. A reconsideration of the poem's structure and logic reveals that Cullen actually expresses the resolution of a paradox, rather than bemoaning his fate.
Yet Do I Marvel
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
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
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.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
Vocabulary
quibble: argue / object
Tantalus: Greek myth. Tantalus was tortured forever by having fruit and water always just out of his reach so he was forever thirsty and hungry.
caprice: whim. sudden unpredictable change of mood, thought, behavior
Sisyphus: Greek myth: God punished Sisyphus by making him endlessly struggle to roll a boulder up to the top of a hill before the boulder promptly rolled back to the bottom of the hill and Sisyphus had to start all over again.
inscrutable: mysterious, incapable of being understood
catechism: formal questions or guiding principals, usually regarding a religious faith.
strewn: scattered
Sympathy
Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Biographical Sketch:
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was an American poet. Born to freed slaves, he became one of the most prominent African-American poets of his time in the 1890s.
Metaphor
Metaphor: A direct comparison between two unlike things, stating that one is the other without using "like" or "as".
Dunbar wrote "Sympathy" at least in part because he was feeling "like he was trapped in a cage" while working at the Library of Congress. Alice Dunbar Nelson, Dunbar's wife, later wrote in a 1914 article that
"The iron grating of the book stacks in the Library of Congress suggested to him the bars of the bird’s cage. June and July days are hot. All out of doors called and the trees of the shaded streets of Washington were tantalizingly suggestive of his beloved streams and fields. The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one. The dry dust of the dry books (ironic incongruity!–a poet shut up with medical works), rasped sharply in his hot throat, and he understood how the bird felt when it beat its wings against its cage."
Sympathy
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats its wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
Vocabulary
opes: opens
faint: light
chalice: fancy cup
steals: sneaks away
bough: tree branch
keener: focused / intense