American Literature / Unit 13 AML 1214 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Countee Cullen and "Yet Do I Marvel"
Captions available
The idea
Cullen, born in nineteen-oh-three and raised in Harlem by a minister's family, wrote in traditional forms and English models. "Yet Do I Marvel" is a sonnet that grants God's inscrutable ways and closes by marvelling at the curious thing of making a poet Black and bidding him sing.
In practice
A sonnet ending on his own case.
Where people slip
The couplet is the whole poem's point.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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