I had to do some Googling to understand two of the characters – Sisyphus was a terrible Greek figure that was punished by eternally pushing a boulder up a hill for cheating death twice. Why? Violating guest right by slaughtering guests to prove himself as a king. Tantalus was also a horrible person by the infamous punishment of the fruit and water receding when he is just about to consume them. Why? Stealing ambrosia and nectar to demonstrate the secrets of immortality…before later cutting his son into pieces to as a gift to the gods. The meter was relatively easy to understand, being an iambic pentameter and having a rhyme scheme initially being an octave for the first eight lines before shifting to a sestet for the last six. The form is also a sonnet, given that it is only 14 lines long. The poem was also published in 1925 during the Harlem Renaissance, and he has published several other poems wondering about what on Earth God’s plan is about, and its intentions (1929: The Black Christ, and Other Poems).

Countee Cullen’s poem of “Yet I Do Marvel” was an interesting debate over what God’s plan is. There are all bad people like Sisyphus and Tantalus existing on Earth, clearly not being good human beings…and as the final couplet reveals, he juxtaposes these figures over his identity as a black poet. Why are there people like those two awful Greek figures, and why are there perfectly normal, dutiful people like Cullen who exist on Earth? He brings up several points as to why God does things humans will still be looking for an answer to. How does God judge people? His own interpretation has God being a good figure. The octave has God giving fates worse than death to sinners – they definitely deserved the fates God gave them. Yet there’s no example of God rewarding someone for their virtuousness, and Cullen himself wonders what God thinks about people (“With petty cares to slightly understand / What awful brain compels His awful hand”). I personally think what Cullen is trying to showcase in that couplet is that God is secretly testing people like Cullen and us to see what we do with our lives, and taking a human’s most significant acts and evaluating them in some kind. In this case, God is secretly testing Cohen’s identity as not only a black person, but also a poet (“and bid him sing!”). The octave serves to warn people not to let sins like selfishness cloud humans’s judgements, lest they end up like Sisyphus and Tantalus. The sestet, on the other hand, reminds people that we have the power to make our own choices – to exhibit virtues or vices.