The speaker, a voice from the grave, addresses God with a mix of pride and resentment. He admits that the stars, suns, and countless worlds are wondrous, but he quickly turns to what human beings have achieved: flight, ships, trains, telescopes, instant communication, electricity, great cities, tunnels, bridges, and lasting works of art like the *Iliad* and *Hamlet*. He has also searched for God through doubt and weariness and found faith again.
Then the tone turns bitter. The closing question is the key: after all this creating, how would God like to make a sun and then, almost at once, have worms sliding between his fingers? The image is deliberately grotesque. The speaker seems to say that even human genius ends in the grave, in decay, and he finds that unfair or impossible to accept. The mood is defiant, weary, and quietly angry—a proud voice protesting mortality.