"I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind"
The poem commences with the speaker invoking his personal conviction that God is benevolent.
“And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind...”
These lines mean that if God felt like discussing hair-splitting details, he could explain why moles live underground in the darkness, and many other perplexing facts of life.
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
The speaker’s reflection on what he might ask God to explain begins with the animal kingdom: why make an animal that lives his life burrowed underground blind? Then he asks a more metaphysical question: why are humans mortal if they were made in God's image?
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
From animal to man, the speaker makes the leap from man to myth. The allusion to Tantalus (a mythological figure whose name gives us the word "tantalize") shows how cruel the punishments God devises can be. The speaker then says that if God wanted to, he could explain whether he doomed Sisyphus to eternally roll a rock up a hill merely because He felt like being cruel on a whim, or whether there is a good reason behind it.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
God’s ways are mysterious, and the basic principles of religion that the faithful memorize are not enough to explain why God does what He does. Human minds are too scattered by everyday worries even to begin to understand. Interestingly, these lines discussing the absentmindedness and scattered thinking of human beings are enjambed (which means they spill over the line). In this way, what is being said (the content) matches how it is said (the form).
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
This final couplet is powerful. Up until here, there is no mention of race and no indication whether or not the speaker is African American. These two lines cause the reader to reassess everything that came before. The first indication of this radical shift is the change in meter. Up until now, the poem was in perfect iambic pentameter. The phrase “Yet do I marvel” breaks the rhythm by starting with a trochee (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one “YET do”) rather than an iamb (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.) The change in meter signals that something important is about to be said, as does the return of the first-person pronoun “I,” which before this was only in the first line of the poem.
After all the examples given (the mole, the mortal body, Tantalus, and Sisyphus) it is the fact of being a poet and black that gives the speaker pause. The fact that God “bid[s]” this poet to “sing” only underlines the poet’s passivity in the matter. This person does not necessarily want to be a poet, but like Tantalus or Sisyphus, he is compelled to do what God wants. Coming also after the repetition of “awful” to describe God’s brain and hand, it is clear that the speaker sees being both black and a poet as an exceedingly difficult position to inhabit. This grave difficulty contrasts with positive words like “marvel” and trivial words like “curious.” In this way, the poem manages to give powerful social commentary through irony, saying one thing and meaning something else.
