Gwendolyn Brooks: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1980s]

I—who have ‘gone the gamut’ from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sun—am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress.

—Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) is the unofficial eternal poet laureate of Chicago. The author of more than 20 books, she remains a highly regarded poet with the distinction of being the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. Brooks’s work bridges the gap between scholarship and public appeal, particularly her activist poetry relating to the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements. Brooks’s work has inspired readers with its sound consciousness, relatability, compassion, and action orientation.

I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black… In the Conference-That-Counts, whose date may be 1980 or 2080 (woe betide the Fabric of Man if it is 2080), there will be no looking up nor looking down.

—Gwendolyn Brooks

The October 2006 issue of Poetry magazine featured Danielle Chapman’s extended consideration of the poems and life ofGwendolyn Brooks. For more on and about Brooks, see our collection.

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Gwendolyn Brooks’s selected poems in order of publication

1940s

a song in the front yard (1945)

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.

This is a great poem to teach. It has vivid, concrete images and a superbly controlled voice, and it manages to question an entire moral-societal order in language that is completely understandable to your average eighth-grader.

–Danielle Chapman

the mother (1945)

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.

As the story goes, Richard Wright begged Brooks not to publish this poem, saying that the world wasn’t ready to read about abortion. Brooks disregarded his advice and published it in her first book, A Street in Bronzeville. It is a poem of complex artistry and is not merely a statement, but is one of Brooks’s first truly original works. At once empathetic and lacerating in its irony, the poem presents the voice of a conflicted conscience as it attempts to rationalize the actions of the past.

–Danielle Chapman

the vacant lot (1945)

Mrs. Coley’s three-flat brick
Isn’t here any more.
All done with seeing her fat little form
Burst out of the basement door;

Though she’s thought of as a patron saint of Bronzeville, Brooks created portraits of her neighbors that were often satirical. Here in one word, “majesty,” she nails Mrs. Coley in all her bumptious, deluded self-regard. Brooks’s jabs usually have a tone of good humor about them, though; especially in her early years, we get the sense that Brooks was amused, rather than disgusted, by most examples of ordinary human folly.

–Danielle Chapman

1950s

We Real Cool(1959)

We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Her most famous poem, “we real cool” is often brought up as an example of what an amazing performer Brooks was. Adopting the bebop rhythm that the poem uses to make its point about the fast life, and emphasizing the “We” at the end of every line until the end, where the “We” vanishes, she stunned audiences with this one. It’s definitely an example of Brooks’s virtues as a craftswoman, but she thought that the poem was overrated. Brooks was far too ambitious a poet to allow her reputation to rest solely on well-executed gimmicks.

–Danielle Chapman

The Bean Eaters (1959)

Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Bean Eaters,” first published in Poetry 1959, follows the unhurried rhythm of an elderly couple’s daily life. Brooks’s careful attention to the couple’s modest dwelling and shared meal of beans is an examination of aging, class, and nostalgia through the lens of everyday life in 20th-century Chicago.

The poem is told by a third-person objective narrator and opens with a description of a couple eating their usual evening meal: “They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.” The speaker calls them an “old yellow pair,” evoking an image of antique or oxidized paper, worn by age. 

For this poor couple, dinner is informal; they eat from plain, chipped dishes at a rickety table with tin cutlery. Readers never learn the couple’s names; they’re simply known as “Bean Eaters,” a term that frames the couple inside a worldview dictated by class and wealth. They are isolated because of their age, poverty, and likely their race, given the broader context of Brooks’s work and her critique of society’s neglect and dehumanization of Black people and minorities. 

The speaker suggests that this couple experiences discrimination because of their poverty; relatedly, so do all “Bean Eaters.” For example, in the line “Dinner is a casual affair,” Brooks uses grandiose language (affair) to exaggerate the couple’s low social status in contrast with elite dinners of fine dining. Legendary for her often surprising and musical word choice, Brooks invents chipware to describe chipped dishes as, perhaps, a contrast to chinaware, demonstrating the sharp contrast between the lives of the rich and poor. 

In the second stanza’s “Two who are Mostly Good. / Two who have lived their day,” the speaker grants the couple respect and dignity through capitalization. The internal rhymes and the anaphora of referring to the couple as “Two” reflect the couple’s sense of familiarity with each other as well as the speaker’s casual reference to this state of living. Nevertheless, the frame of the name “Bean Eaters” confines the pair to a routine of isolation, anonymity, and monotony.” The couple is both human and nameless, neglected and erased by ageism, racism, and poverty. 

In the last two lines of the poem, readers discover that the couple’s “rented back room” is filled with traces of what they’ve experienced and vestiges of memory: "beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes." Though the list lacks grammatical punctuation and makes the items seem like meaningless odds and ends, the couple cherishes them; the two even spend time “putting things away,” suggesting the pleasures and burdens of nostalgia even among what some consider “fringe” objects. 

This “Mostly Good” couple has “lived their day,” yet they persist. All the while, they reminisce: “And remembering … / Remembering, with twinklings and twinges…” Remembering brings both joy and melancholy, and as they remember, they huddle over their dinner of beans in shared seclusion.

–Sarah Alcaide-Escue

1960s

The Lovers of the Poor(1960)

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting

Written during the civil rights movement, this masterful poem marked a change in Brooks’s thinking and a fierce awakening to the racism that surrounded her. While it retains the control, irony, and brilliantly-imagined details that were signatures of Brooks’s style, it employs these techniques to expose the injustices she’d endured throughout her life. It’s shocking to read this poem now (more than 40 years after it was written) and find that it still crackles with the electricity of justified rage.

–Danielle Chapman

1980s

An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire (1987)

“An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire” was originally published as the final poem in Brooks’s 1969 chapbook RIOT. Throughout the poem, Brooks uses relatively short sentences, resisting grammatical complexity, that carry quiet, controlled energy. 

When reading the title, one can’t help but think of Robert Frost’s famous poem “Fire and Ice.” His poem is a metaphor for humanity’s perceptions of fiery desire and icy hatred, ultimately describing how humans will end their own existence. In her title, Brooks clarifies that the poem represents or describes only one aspect or element of love, breathing and living amid the power struggle of the “fire and ice” of the human world. 

The poem’s first stanza opens with “In a package of minutes there is this We. / How beautiful,” wherein the speaker relishes the moment when she and her lover are together, however fleeting it is. There’s tenderness in their pleasure, an unveiling of the eroticism of private life detailed by sacred, mutual giving: “Merry foreigners in our morning, / we laugh, we touch each other.” 

The poem shifts attention to the lovers’ daily obligations and the political world. They “are responsible props and posts,” invoking radical political consciousness and the labor-intensive responsibility of driving meaningful change. Although “A physical light is in the room,” the world “at the window,” perhaps Frost’s world of fire and ice, calls the lovers outside to “the imperturbable street,” for there is work to do.

The speaker describes her co-warrior in love as “direct and self-accepting as a lion / in Afrikan velvet. You are level, lean, / remote.” The speaker evokes a powerful image of her lover as a lion, the king of the jungle, wearing velvet––a luxurious and valuable fabric originating in Egypt and often worn by nobles and royalty. This line suggests the speaker sees her lover as regal, and the lover himself possesses a majestic sense of confidence and pride, all originating in images of “Afrikan” nobility and royalty.

Their love is monumental and mutual, rooted in friendship; readers wonder at the “interruption” the speaker anticipates. The invented phrase “not-to-end” and the repetition of “interruption” emphasizes the fact that the speaker desperately wants this moment, this privacy, to be endless, yet it cannot be. 

Meditating on the diaphanous nature of time, the lovers reach for independence in spirit and mind in resistance against the world. They are distinct, yet united in their love, understanding themselves as “Merry foreigners” before their duties call them away, before they must “go / in different directions / down the imperturbable street.”

–Sarah Alcaide-Escue

Young Afrikans (1987)

This poem speaks to the “fury” the Black community experiences, sustained over generations of oppression. Brooks begins the poem bluntly with the phrase “of the furious,” bolded and emboldened. In present tense, emphasized by the bold type, this furious is active and alive. Etymologically, fury and furious derive from the French, Latin, and Greek words for rage, frenzy; passion; and to be mad. An interesting note on the origin of fury that is relevant to Brooks’s poem is that“Romans used Furiæ to translate Greek Erinyes, the collective name for the avenging deities sent from Tartarus to punish criminals—in later accounts three in number and female. Hence, in English, figuratively, ‘an angry woman’ (late 14th century).” Without making an assumptive leap, this specific word with its ancient history is something Brooks and her readers could associate with the trope of the “angry black woman.” Turning this trope on its head to question it, Brooks might universalize the emotion of fury as belonging to the inheritance of but not exclusively to Black women and members of the Black community as a whole who fight injustice. 

Brooks proceeds by addressing the “furious” as those “Who take Today and jerk it out of joint.” “Today” is capitalized, placing importance on it being a proper noun and a marker of this particular day holding significance. The it in “jerk it out of joint” refers to the Today that is not only the day referred to in the poem but also any today readers might identify as a day to “decree” “chiming now.”. 

The impression the stanza that follows makes early in the poem renders Blacktime a reorienting and reframing with a sense of timeliness that is also timeless and “chimeful,” or sonic. Whereas chimeful is not itself a recognized word, it affectively causes readers to hear a familiar sound, as of a chime, or associate it with the word cheerful. A chime, as from a clock or a bell, indicates the time or hour. In the context of the poem, chimeful announces the arrival of “blacktime” and the “chimeful / poemhood” that documents “jagged chiming now” or furious change and jerking the present out of joint.

Brooks uses a method of word combining and compounding that puts two or more words together to form one word or phrase. These new compound words carry the full meaning of both words, invoking more in one instance than either could individually. One instance is her combination of hardheroic in “hardheroic maim,” indicating the paradox in which white slave owners felt themselves to be heroes or “saviors'' of those they enslaved. Brooks describes this violent discipline of the enslaved by white colonists metaphorically as “leechlike-as-usual,” with the use of the word carp taking on a double meaning. Though many readers might first think of carp as referring to the type of fish commonly consumed, carp also holds a definition that means “complaint,” which allows a reading of the line to be “leechlike-as-usual who use, / adhere to, complaint, and harm.” Referring back to the idea that white violence is inflicted and paraded as a “necessary evil,” when in historical reality it was always meant to suck the life out of its victims and use complaint to justify the violence, leeches and complaining or carping tie whiteness to violence as earlier Blackness was tied to cheerful chiming and fury. A similar contemporary colloquial phrase would be one in which an abusive person blames the victim of harm using a rationale akin to “why do you make me hurt you?”

Brooks’s bracing poem concludes by reminding readers of the ever-alive pulse and sonic quality of its words. Throughout, Brooks capitalized specific words that, when paired, create their own poem distilling much of the full poem’s meaning:

Who Today Head Blacktime
If Rowdy!--
As 
The
Must 
Must
Talking Today
And
Changes
Black
Black

It is the reclamation of “black revival” being made of vinegar, acid on the tongue, not something those of a white and racist society will easily swallow. This vinegar serves as an irony for a white readership who would self-describe the existence of blackness as something “bitter” for their social and political tastes. The ironic turn Brooks uses implies that the struggle for Black liberation will always be experienced as if tasting vinegar but that this bitterness allows “our hot blood” to be invigorated by the same sense of taste that rejects it.

–Natalie Earnhart 

Boy Breaking Glass (1987)

Marc Crawford was a black writer and editor who suggested to Brooks that she write passionately about the plight and villainization of Black men. Brooks dedicated “Boy Breaking Glass” to Crawford’s suggestion by writing “To Marc Crawford / from whom the commission.” Starting the poem with a beautifully broken image, “Whose broken window is a cry of art,” indicates that from destruction comes the grief of art, that art can be born of grief. As a marker of her style, Brooks writes in contradictions such as “elegance, as a treasonable faith” to underline the complexity of life’s dualities; that which is “elegance” is also “treasonable faith.” Treason against one’s country remains a crime of the utmost charge, whereas the word faith implies uncompromisable devotion and commitment. Something of “treasonable faith” commits to what is not socially accepted but is necessary. “Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament” also speaks to this sentiment of what is visible and so recognizable, an “ornament” or spectacle unmistakably recognizable and marked to be visibly rejected. Because of Brooks’s epigraph, readers may assume the rejected and “treasonable” to be the cry of art of Black men.

Brooks proclaims, “I shall create! If not a note, a hole. / If not an overture, a desecration.” Both declarative and dismissive, this statement contains opposite intentions that may cancel each other out. An overture begins a musical composition; a “desecration” is an ultimate death or ending but in a way that is sacrosanct. To desecrate something is to destroy something sacred, something treasured. That which is created is majestically announced and defiled before it starts. As a commentary on being brought into the world as a Black boy who grows into a Black man, this poem points to a dilemma described by an old adage: people are “damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.” Even with a beautiful beginning, there is no ending to honor such a beginning. As Brooks attempts to describe the paradox of existing as a Black man in America, she cannot reach a description without certain grief and anger:

Don’t go down the plank
if you see there’s no extension.
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.

The existential dilemma is that existence is brief and contradictory and has no ability to extend itself. That “loneliness is fidgety revenge” describes an unrelenting twitch: one might try to pretend to be unbothered by loneliness but is noticeably, uncomfortably discontent.

In the last three stanzas of the poem, Brooks scopes out to a universal picture that is also the deep root of a systemic issue. She begins to end:

Each one other
is having different weather.
 “It was you, it was you who threw away my name!
And this is everything I have for me.”

“Having different weather” serves as a metaphor for people’s different, specific experiences as they move through the world. It’s a way for Brooks to also infer that even if people are in the same space, everyone has different internal awareness and meaning-making processes. The lines that follow, written as dialogue as if being spoken in the moment, address the inequality of “ownership” discrimination causes among people of color. The emphasis on “you who threw away my name! And this was everything I have for me” speaks to the legacy of slavery in which enslaved persons were not allowed to choose their own names; after slavery ended, their names became one of the few things they were able to “own” for themselves.

The more sullen, forceful ending of the poem directly names both luxuries and symbols of American freedom that are still “gatekept” from Black American citizens, including “Congress” and the “Statue of Liberty.” Woven in are simple luxuries, such as “lobster,” “luau,” and even “love.” Brooks determines this list of denials to be a “sloppy amalgamation,” a “mistake,” and a “cliff” that threatens death and the looming precipice of social immobility. Ending on powerful words of “A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun” might be contradictorily translated as a prayer, a trap, or an unrelenting force no human can control but every human is at the mercy of: the unrelenting sun that scorches with impunity.

–Natalie Earnhart