17 pages • 34 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksThe birth in a narrow room
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Children of the Poor” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1949)
From the same collection as “the birth in the narrow room,” the poem reflects on the struggles of disenfranchised parents. As such the poem can be read as a complimentary perspective to “the birth”—how to care for a child when love is not enough, when the child feels like the “little lifting of helplessness.” Money cannot buy happiness—Brooks is not so crass. But money would secure stability and give a parent a chance to comfort their children.
“On Imagination” by Phillis Wheatley (1773)
Brooks often acknowledged her creative debt to Wheatley, a slave in the days of American Revolution. Brooks admired Wheatley’s mastery of the forms of British poetry and her deft use of those models despite the reality of her life as an enslaved person. Indeed, this poem describes how Wheatley can find joyous escape and authentic liberation through her fancy, an idea Brooks explores in the second stanza of this poem.
“Childhood” by Margaret Walker (1942)
A contemporary of Brooks and one of the leading figures in Chicago’s Black Renaissance, Walker, a transplanted Southerner, here presents a far different picture of childhood. She remembers as a child the impoverished conditions of her Deep South world during the Depression before her family migrated to Chicago, an apocalyptic world of “famine, terror, flood, and plague.” It is Brooks’s vision without the animation and energy and release of the child’s imagination.
Further Literary Resources
“Gwendolyn Brooks and the Legacies of Architectural Modernism” by Jo Gill (2019)
This article offers a wide-ranging reading of Brooks’s early collection, including Annie Allen. It uses Chicago’s architectural boom of the 1930s and 1940s to trace how Brooks introduced the metaphors of architecture to investigate questions of perception and perspective, the exhilarating open freedom of pure space, and inevitably the tension between space and force.
“‘The Kindergarten of New Consciousness’: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Social Construction of Childhood” by Richard Flynn (2000)
The article uses Brooks’s poems of childhood, including the cycle from Annie Allen, to investigate how Brooks’s conception of the power of the child and the energy of innocence provided her with a metaphor for Black poets coming to terms with the reality of life in segregated America. In the metaphor of the child, Brooks found a suggestive symbol for how Black writers in segregated America can evolve into awareness and authentic empowerment.
“Gwendolyn Brooks: The Early Work and the Problem of ‘Reaching Everyone in the World’” by Leslie Monsour (2022)
Using rage as an organizing key term, the article juxtaposes Brooks’s early poetry, including Annie Allen, against the poetry she produced after her so-called conversion to militancy in the late 1960s. The article uses Brooks’s early embrace of conventional (meaning white) poetic forms and her later experiments with jazz-influenced raw and ragged open verse constructs as the vehicle most appropriate for Black anger.
Listen to the Poem
Although neither YouTube nor Spotify offers a recording of “the birth in a narrow room,” the aural impact of Brooks’s deft use of the prosody of traditional classical poetry (she termed the form sonnet-ballads) can be heard in a recording of Brooks herself reading a variety of her poems, including her later free verse works. The recording was done when Brooks was serving as the nation’s Poet Laureate. The readings reveal Brooks’s playful sense of how words create rhythm and sustain a sense of rhyme without relying on conventional prosody schemes. These are illuminating to listen to. The entire 1985 recording is available through the Library of Congress website.
Related Titles
By Gwendolyn Brooks
