Gwendolyn Brooks 'A Song In The Front Yard'

The poem “The White Porch” by Cathy Song is an illustration of maturity and coming of age. There is an innocent tone to the beginning of the poem with sensual undertones as the writing progress’s. In the poem, a woman is reminiscing about her young womanhood as she sits on her porch awaiting her presumed lover. Song creates the character of the woman to be of a homemaker, describing her duties taking care of laundry, having a cake in the oven and snapping beans in her lap. Through the visualization that Song creates it is assumed that the woman is pregnant, and as she is waiting for her husband she thinks back to the things she herself used to do when she was younger with her own mother. She is reflecting on the way her mother raised her thinking about how she wants to raise her own child. The speaker admits to sneaking in her lover late at night behind her mother’s back, but does not seem to feel remorseful because all her decisions led to where she is in her life now. Cathy Songs poem “The White Porch” portrays the transition of a girl into a woman using symbolism, imagery and simile.

She describes her children as “carving the mind up with the scalpels of their din”, highlighting the mental tolls of motherhood where the demand from the children are affecting her mental health. This is reinforced by her saying “They nearly drove me up the wall” which can suggest that she was on the verge of losing her sanity. The negative connotation in “In the park” of the two children “whining” and “bickering” whilst “tugging at her skirt” shares similar ideas of it being mentally exhausting and is literal imagery where the children symbolises the figurative burden of being tied down. The lack of identity in her children symbolises the mother’s omniscient and distant attitude towards her nameless and featureless children. The dialogue in stanza 2 of “Up the Wall” also discloses the characters feelings where she has “no one around here I can call” and states that “she is so alone” emphasising that she is isolated and has no support.

Literally, the persona of the poem is outside when some aspects of the nature around her, like violets and a blackbird, trigger a memory from her childhood. The poem then flashbacks to a childhood memory of the persona as a young girl, which is shown through the indentation of the stanzas, where the girl wakes up in the afternoon thinking it is morning and becomes upset when she

Janie trivializes the porches as she loses the sense of connection towards them. The porches don’t symbolize any significance to her, as no new opportunities can arise from them. Janie had believed she had her dream completed, but it was only temporary. Janie now realizes that she will never achieve the dream her younger self aspired to achieve and moves on from the reality. Once coming to this realization, Janie and other women around this time period had to pursue new interests and change their lives for the better.

The poem also uses end rhyme to add a certain rhythm to the poem as a whole. And the scheme he employs: aabbc, aabd, aabbad. End rhyme, in this poem, serves to effectively pull the reader through to the end of the poem. By pairing it with lines restricted to eight syllables. The narrator creates an almost nursery-rhyme like rhythm. In his third stanza however, his last line, cutting short of eight syllables, stands with an emphatic four syllables. Again, in the last stanza, he utilizes the same technique for the last line of the poem. The narrator’s awareness of rhyme and syllable structure provides the perfect bone structure for his poem’s rhythm.

“Today, though, the house is gone and with it a sadness i wore as a turtle wears its shell….” (Cantwell, 1998) In the destruction of the garden, replacing it with grass, she is trying to convey that she is ridding herself of the old to make room for the new.

Harwood revolves this poem around change, through the use of a motherly character she is able to construct a life style that has dramatically changed from free to a fairly constricted. Harwood uses the conversations of two people to get this message across, with the conversation discussing life’s progression with an old lover. “But for the grace of God…” suggests that the ex-lover is somewhat thankful for not ending up as a father figure to these children, as he can see the effect it has taken on her from when he used to know her. “Her clothes are out of date” shows her appearance has altered in the bid to live as a mother, her children are now her identity and that is what she will live to be. This poem is revolved around the negativity of losing yourself through mother-hood and the factors that slowly show that it.

To understand and describe Gwendolyn Brooks poem “We Real Cool” the reader must know what the Pronoun we represent. The reader must also free his or her mind from any type of stereotypical thinking; in fact, if the reader finds it tough to let go of the stereotype thinking, he or she will have the wrong understanding of what this poem is about, and miss a great educational prospect of how different social classes think. If the poem is read once and the words are taken at face value, the reader will be correct in thinking that this poem is about some high school dropouts who hang out at the pool hall every day, drinking, gambling, listening to raunchy music, and Chasing girls. However, the reader will not be out of the custom thinking that

In order to occupy her child, the mother dresses her daughter up to go sing in the children’s choir at church in the fifth stanza. She brushes her hair, bathes her, and puts on her gloves and shoes. Randall appeals to the senses in this stanza; he uses a metaphor here to inform the reader a visual that the family is African American. She has “night-dark” hair and small brown hands. She is dressed in white and smells of sweet rose petals. The mother takes the girls mind off of the Freedom March and fixes it on the children’s choir. The tone is one of content. The sixth stanza is a

     The last stanza of the poem completes the hidden meaning held within the poem.  Gluck finishes the poem with this stanza that informs us that ?the mothers shall scour the orchards for a way out? .  This confirms the suggestion that attending school is an escape for

She sent her child to sing in the choir, in hopes she would be safe in God’s tabernacle, but instead, the child went to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church death trap. Secondly, I disagree with the way Dudley Randall ended the poem. Even though the reader can assume what happened to the child, the poem slightly leaves you with a cliffhanger. The child’s lifeless body cannot be found by her desperate and destitute mother. The audience can be left feeling melancholy and incomplete. Lastly, Randall, in my opinion, strategically wrote stanza five in the poem very well,“She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair, And bathed rose petal sweet, And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands, And white shoes on her feet”(Randall 19). Lastly, the white gloves and white shoes represent purity and innocence of the adolescent. The way the little girl brushes her black hair and bathes in sweet aromas represents the child’s vulnerability and how sweet the little things are in life.

The poem does not follow a rhyme scheme or meter, which means that there is rhythm in the poem and it makes the poem more like a song. The poem has four stanza’s and has five lines within each stanza.

The second stanza is almost like the first in the fact that it appeals to the same senses. It talks about the actions and the feelings of the child. It describes how the child would wake and wait for his father to call him. The second stanza also describes the mood of the house in the line, "fearing the chronic angers of that house." Perhaps that line is

As the speaker casually calls their parents, a setting of calm expectations is established. While greeting the speaker, the mother’s decision to “run out and get” (1) the father highlights the lack of urgency that is present. The mother is calm and fetches the father in an expected and relaxed fashion, further establishing the calm expectations of the ongoing call. The mother additionally states that “the weather here’s so good” (2). Heaney’s use of the word “good” reflects the setting of the mother and father’s home; the atmosphere of where they live is pleasant and unperturbed. The “weather” serves as a projection of the father’s own state, implying that the father is in good health and that death is not yet looming over him. The last spoken words in the poem reveal that the father was conducting “a bit of weeding” (3). The word “weeding” highlights the capability of the

Never mind it, for when your head’s bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair” (line 6-8). Also in the fifth stanza Tom describes his dream. “Then naked and white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind; And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, He’d have God for his father, and never want joy” (line 21-24). He dreams that after chimney sweepers die they go on to see God and live happily. The children just have to pay the price on earth before they have happiness, but they were all very hopeful. However, the children’s mood changes completely in Songs of Experience. “And because I am happy and sing, They think they have done me no injury” (line 9-10). The children are becoming more and more bitter. All their hope is being lost overtime. Now the children don’t think they have a plan for the future. This lifestyle has had a major impact on their life. Being chimney sweepers, being tormented and having to endure terrible conditions.