“a song in the front yard”

One of the many "weeds" my son calls "flowers".
Attribution: Angel caboodle at Wiki Commons

I had read Gwedolyn Brooks’ poem “a song in the front yard” a few months ago for another class  so I have read it like 20 times.  So here is my close reading of the poem.

Structure

This poem is in quatrains with the last two lines rhyming.  This rhyme is actually quite important in helping to develop the speaker’s child- like voice. 

Speaker

The speaker seems to be a young girl. The lines “a girl gets sick of a rose” and the desire to “be a bad woman, too” tell the reader that the speaker I probably a female.  The fact that she is in the “yard”, the way she talks about her mother and the ignorant childlike tone tell us the speaker is young.   And, of course, the fact that the child talks about when she “will grow up” proves this as well. The end rhyme adds to this feeling.

No Caps in Title

I never noticed before, but for some reason the title is in all lower case letters.  From looking at “the mother” and “kitchenette building” one could think was just a style choice by the author.   However, not all her poems have this type of title.  I wonder why some do and others do not at first I thought it was just all lower case when she was writing from a single perspective that represents a group or a group.

But I am not sure because “We Real Cool” has capitals.  Then again that feels like a different “we”. 

Perhaps I am over thinking, but then again can one over think?  And isn’t thinking oneself is overthinking in itself over thinking.

A rose-- A flower everyone agrees is a flower
Attribution: Georges Seguin

Tone

The repetition creates the child-like feel as well.  The “And” starts in the last stanza, the two “wonderful”s in the third stanza.  The multiple “it’s fine”.  The urgency adds to this as well.  This is seen in the “now” and “today” and the overall pace of the poem.  The poem goes point, point, point and keeps moving kind of like a child’s mind (or mine but that’s a whole other story).

Tension

I think the main tension in this poem comes from the young-girl like speaker discussing the serious issues of poverty, starvation, jail and prostitution in this child like ignorant tone.   The “back yard” is described as a “good time”, the “charity children” are said to do “wonderful things” and have “wonderful fun”.

The tension is added to by the mother who clearly has a different perspective and one could argue a less ignorant one.  The fact that the poem is written from a child’s perspective makes one want to doubt the speaker’s judgment.  And of course we readers are reading from an adult perspective like the mother’s right?

Maybe not.

I don’t think this poem would hold the same weight if adults did not often think same way as the child in this poem.  I meet them all the time (make me extremely frustrated), but then again I am totally in mom zone.

Maybe this is commentary about the need to rebel against society/tradition and how that can be a childlike ignorant thing to do.  Maybe it is proclaiming sort of the opposite.  That one must be childlike so that one can rebel against society. 

The Other

Lastly, I would like to point out that this poem uses an “other” (the child) to discuss more others in society (poor kids and prostitutes).