Yet Do I Marvel

Although Cullen believes that God had good intentions and is holy, he also acknowledges that God is the cause of evil in the world, which conveys how he is confused and uncertain about the higher power.
Cullen originally expresses the traditional Christian belief that God is both good and holy.  The first life, and ultimately the most prominent, is "I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind" (1).  In this line alone, Cullen expresses complete certainty regarding the subject, explicitly saying "I doubt not."  However, as the poem continues, extreme certainty about God and His intentions does not seem to be the case.
Following his seemingly certain belief in God's good intentions, Cullen then alludes to the bad things that God is responsible for, such as how it is odd and unfair that humans, though created in God's image, are not immortal and must die.  Cullen then alludes to the image of Adam and Eve, as he talks of one being "baited by the fickle fruit" (6).  However, Cullen does not express the situation being Adam and Eve's fault, he places the responsibility of not consuming the fruit on the fruit that was created by God Himself.  By using the word "baited," Cullen is removing the blame from those who ate the fruit since they were put in a trap that forced them to do so.
Cullen expresses how he aims to question God and his belief system.  This is seen in Cullen's attempt to understand God's motives and tries to comprehend "What awful brain compels His awful hand" (12).  He ends the poem by acknowledging how God was cruel to him.  God created him, a black poet, and is pushing him to share his work, which is an unfair and unusual combination.
Overall, Cullen is both impresses and displeased by God.  Although he knows and is confident in the fact that God is good and well-meaning, He can also be cruel and unfair, causing terrible events to take place, creating a contradictory belief system.

1984 Quotes

• "You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumptions that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement was scrutinized" (3)
• Party's slogans: "War is peace / Freedom is slavery / Ignorance is strength" (4)
• "In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair.  The horrible thin about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in" (14)
• "Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise.  To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction" (17)
• "Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason" (30)
• "If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened-that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death" (34)
• "Don't you see that the whole sim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?  In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it" (52)
• "It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous" (82)
• "At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid" (109)
• "She had even (an infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles" (130)
• "He learned with astonishment that all the workers in the Pornosec, except the head of the department, were girls.  The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled" (131)
• "Life as she saw it was quite simple.  You wanted a good time; 'they,' meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could" (131)
• "To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next break so long as there is air available" (152)
• "The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world" (164)
• "The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition.  They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another.  For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world.  The proles had stayed human" (165)