Yet Do I Marvel Analysis

There's a famous saying around poetry campfires that "form is content." That sounds smart, and maybe even interesting, but what does it mean and what does it have to do with "Yet Do I Marvel"? Pull...

Our speaker is a smart guy. He seems like someone you'd trust and someone who has an inquisitive mind. Great dinner date, this guy, right? Okay, maybe not that, but he's definitely got big things o...

The funny thing about this sonnet is that there's no real location. In fact, there's no real action in the poem. It's more of an intellectual argument than an evening or a story. We're really just...

Read the first two lines of "Yet Do I Marvel" out loud (we did). What do you hear? A lot of T and D sounds, right? Let's be more specific: "doubt", "not", "God", "good", "kind", "And", "did", "stoo...

The titles of poems are always curious little buggers, and in this case, the title appears in line 13 of the poem. So does the speaker have a stutter or is he running out of ways to sound poetic? N...

How do we know this sonnet is by Cullen? Let us Countee the ways: His poems are often written in traditional poetic forms (in this case, a sonnet). His poems often reference the major literary cano...

"Yet Do I Marvel" is definitely a poemy poem. We've got a traditional form, a strict rhyme scheme, some funny sounding syntax to keep the lines in iambic pentameter (check out "Form and Meter"), al...

Ever heard of W.E.B. DuBois? He was a big-time civil rights activist alive when Countee Cullen was writing. In fact, they were friends. Actually, more than that. Countee Cullen, being the superstar...

Cullen keeps it real formal and real tasteful the whole time. We're talking God, race, and goodness here, and not much else.

Tantalus (5)Sisyphus (7)