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Gwendolyn BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem takes place primarily in the kitchen of the speaker’s home, which symbolically represents the only role the speaker is allowed to inhabit in real-life. She is ultimately a fairly powerless instrument of her husband’s hatred and violence. What little agency the speaker possesses is ineffectual for its lack of reality—and ultimately proves dangerous because it gives her husband the reason he needs to enact violence on others. No matter how many times the speaker attempts to use fantasy to distract herself from her guilt, fear, and hatred, she is unable to escape “the kitchen” that represents her real-life role as a 1950s woman, housewife, and mother.
The color red appears in multiple forms within the poem. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker states, “It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood. / A wildness cut up, and tied in little bunches” (Lines 2-3). The “it” here is meant to be the murder of Emmett Till, the act that the speaker tries to replace in her mind with the events of a romantic ballad. Her husband’s mouth, an instrumental extension of his violence and the violence of white, patriarchal society is also described as being red: “His mouth, wet and red, / So very, very, very red” (Lines 121-22).
By Gwendolyn Brooks
A Sunset of the City
A Sunset of the City
Gwendolyn Brooks
Boy Breaking Glass
Boy Breaking Glass
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Cynthia in the Snow
Cynthia in the Snow
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Maud Martha
Maud Martha
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my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
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Speech to the Young
Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)
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The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
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The birth in a narrow room
The birth in a narrow room
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The Blackstone Rangers
The Blackstone Rangers
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The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
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The Crazy Woman
The Crazy Woman
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The Lovers of the Poor
The Lovers of the Poor
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The Mother
The Mother
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the rites for Cousin Vit
the rites for Cousin Vit
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To Be in Love
To Be in Love
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To The Diaspora
To The Diaspora
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Ulysses
Ulysses
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We Real Cool
We Real Cool
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