A sonnet by Countee Cullen, printed in his first book, Color (Harper & Brothers, 1925). The text used here is transcribed from a scan of that first edition at Wikisource. The 1925 edition is in the public domain in the United States.
Its shape is an argument. Twelve lines grant that God is good and unknowable. The thirteenth line turns on one word, Yet, and the fourteenth names the thing the speaker cannot square: a gift handed to someone the world has already bound.
Brute caprice is a beautiful coupling of words. They speak of the all-too-human oafishness and intemperance that is inextricable to our angelic nature; posing an interesting philosophical question: Was Sisyphus condemned to eternal torture for possessing human traits in the presence of the gods?
That is the sentence this game is built on. The trait and the sentence are the same trait. Sisyphus is punished for the cleverness that made him worth punishing.
The speaker is astonished that God would produce the paradox of creating someone situated in hardship and yet instructing that person to compose beauty.
The annotation goes on to Langston Hughes, whose 1926 essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (The Nation, June 23, 1926) opens by quoting an unnamed young poet: I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet. Hughes read that as a wish to be white. Readers have long taken the unnamed poet to be Cullen. Hughes never says so.
The same annotation quotes the scholar James Smethurst arguing that Cullen, who was gay at a time when saying so carried legal and professional danger, tended to move his sense of transgressive sexuality into the vocabulary of race. That is an interpretation of the poem, offered here as one, and quoted secondhand from the annotation rather than checked against Smethurst's original.
Annotation source: Yet Do I Marvel, annotated on Genius.
The mole. Cullen's first example. The annotation notes that God could easily explain why one of his creations was denied sight, and does not. Here, digging is the strength and the strength is what puts the light out of reach.
The flesh. The line refers to Genesis 1:27, man made in God's image. The image does not die. The thing made in its likeness does. Here the heartbeat is both what moves you and what runs out.
Tantalus. In the myth he stands in water that recedes when he stoops and under fruit that withdraws when he reaches. Here the recession is proportional to the reach, so the fruit is nearest when the arm is down.
Sisyphus. Condemned by Zeus to roll a boulder forever. Here the stone gains exactly the weight you put into it, so the ceiling is set by your own strength rather than by the hill.
In German, the word Gift means poison. English gift and German Gift come from the same root, a word meaning simply a giving. German narrowed it to the dose that was given.