Yet Do I Marvel Essay

Alessandra Gonzalez-Valdez

English 1302

Professor Lopez

13 March 2023

PAPER 3 NAME During the American pre-civil War period, sometime after, and even now, black Americans were treated unjustly and silenced. “Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen expresses Cullens's faith in how god chose to make a poet black, meaning why God would make him a poet if his voice weren’t going to be heard. The context of Cullen’s poem connects to the use of his language in ways that represent the Jim Crow laws period and the Harlem Renaissance where he questions his faith specifically why God allows suffering. “Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen is a poem written about Cullen's faith and God’s choices. In the Poem, Cullen understands everything God decides, from

These laws were placed to separate specifically blacks and whites legally but were also used to separate people by gender and class. The name “Jim Crow” comes from a minstrel show which was shows that made black people seem helpless and lost which was shown how they were played, “...wore shabby overalls, shuffled across the stage in bare feet, and carried a banjo.” (Tischauser 1). In Cullens's poem “Yet Do I Marvel”, this is represented especially when Cullen writes, “To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” (Cullen). This being because the people with power, the white people, suppress the voices of black people at all costs, it was as if black poets and voices were blacklisted. Cullen points out the irony of God choosing to make him a black poet and ask him to write and publish when he is stopped by obstacles that are in place during his time

His choice of words represents the context of the sonnet especially when Cullen writes about his faith, “I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind…” (Cullen) his faith is one of the main topics of the poem. Including the struggles of being a black poet, it represents the context in which he is in which is the Harlem Renaissance happening where African American works and talents were being shown off at an all-time high. He questions God even when he believes that God has no bad intentions, and although he is a bystander to other things like death and the eyesight of a mole rat, his curiosity expands when it comes to his poetical