A Rhetoric Analysis Of Countee Cullen's Yet Do I Marvel

Literature has long been difficult to understand, an author’s use of rhetoric can be analyzed to have many different significances as well as meanings. Poetry is particularly difficult to analyze, thus many writers and critics have created their own arguments for the meaning of different pieces. As literary critics and scholars ourselves, we in this English 100W class must determine what arguments we find valid, and which arguments give us deeper insight on pieces that we read and study. One of such works is Countee Cullen’s Yet Do I Marvel, Cullen’s poem, though simple and short, contains in it masterfully used rhetoric that many have tried to derive meaning from. Critics who have analyzed the poem comment both on its use as a commentary
Reimherr states that “There was a tension between Cullen 's desire to be purely a lyric poet and his feelings of race-consciousness.” Thus, this idea insists the poem “Yet Do I Marvel” and its earlier presented lines to express the meaning: “When one is oppressed for a difference beyond his control, how can he sing” (Reimherr), stressing the idea that Cullen at times lamented and was frustrated by the differences set by race, particularly him being black. In an essence Reimherr states that the poem is Cullen’s questioning of the racial differences in society, and therefore a representation of his race consciousness which leads him to question why God puniHes him in such a way as to make him a poet and
Fetrow expresses that the lines that question why God has puniHed his creatures are actually ironic statements which insist that God has given them means of survival. The mole is blind because he does not require sight to live in his environment, that sight may actually be a hindrance. Humans made of flesh in God’s image only die physical, but survive spiritually with God, thus another means of survival beyond the grave (Fetrow, 1939). His analysis is an interesting contradiction to