God’s motivation for the creation is human, basic, and understandable: "I'm lonely-- / I'll make me a world." The actual mechanics of creation are created in detail chosen to form a mental picture of real activity in the mind of the listener:

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,

And God rolled the light around in his hands

Until he made the sun;

And he set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.

And the light that was left from making the sun

God gathered it up in a shining ball

And flung it against the darkness,

Spangling the night with the moon and stars.

 

One can easily imagine a preacher miming such actions. In the creation of Man a specifically black image is created.

This Great God,

Like a mammy bending over her baby,

Kneeled down in the dust

Toiling over a lump of clay

Till he shaped it in his own image;

 

Then into it he blew the breath of life,

And man became a living soul.

 

The anthropomorphic God who appears in these lines is maintained consistently throughout the poem. He is not the remote, formal, all-knowing God of the Scriptures so much as an approachable, questioning, evolving Being with whom the listener could identify. Creation is an act of problem-solving, as God seeks to remedy the loneliness that has plagued Him; thus He is not only an understanding but an understandable Being. The use of long and short lines suggests the changing tempo of the preacher's speech, and the occasional dashes indicate "a certain sort of pause that is marked by a quick intaking and an audible expulsion of the breath. . . ." On the whole, "The Creation" is a dignified poem whose tone and diction are appropriate to its solemn subject.