This revelation transforms the poem from a general comment upon the human experience to personal reflection. Of all the incomprehensible actions of God, the most amazing for the poet to understand is that God made him both a poet and Black. Two important areas of allusion in the poem are Classical mythology and the Bible. The mythological references center on Sisyphus and Tantalus, two great sinners of ancient Greece. In the poem, Cullen ignores ancient accounts of the crimes of Tantalus, who tried to outwit the gods by feeding them the flesh of his own son, and Sisyphus who tried to escape death. Instead Cullen presents their eternal punishments in the afterlife as essentially inexplicable. Humankind simply does not possess
This revelation transforms the poem from a general comment upon the human experience to personal reflection. Of all the incomprehensible actions of God, the most amazing for the poet to understand is that God made him both a poet and Black. Two important areas of allusion in the poem are Classical mythology and the Bible. The mythological references center on Sisyphus and Tantalus, two great sinners of ancient Greece. In the poem, Cullen ignores ancient accounts of the crimes of Tantalus, who tried to outwit the gods by feeding them the flesh of his own son, and Sisyphus who tried to escape death. Instead Cullen presents their eternal punishments in the afterlife as essentially inexplicable. Humankind simply does not possess