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.
Symbols & Motifs
A Child
Although the character of Annie Allen, whose first years this poem chronicles, will grow as an adult to grapple with loneliness, poverty, death, and segregation, the poem offers the child as a symbol of raw energy and pure possibility, a child who is “[b]lurred and stupendous. Wanted and unexpected” (Line 2). The poem works on the distance between what we understand and what the child realizes. For now, the child apparently seems oblivious to its racial or gender or economic identities.
The baby, apparently unexpected but still loved, symbolizes brash reckless exploration. The opening stanza records the grasping eye typical of a newborn dazzled by a world outside themselves. Without pattern (that would impose a very adult sort of logic), the first stanza moves about the furnishings of the home, showing the child’s fascination with things. In the second stanza, the child indulges the reach of the unfettered imagination that allows, for a time, the world not to be limited by what it is. In this, Brooks’s child symbolizes hope, a principle of optimism and expectation that will perhaps someday curve into disappointment and regret. All too soon, the child must settle into a grown-up world of outhouses and discarded jelly jars.
A Narrow Room
Literally, the narrow room into which the child is born and raised represents the tight confines of post-war housing in Bronzeville, street after street of nearly identical Greystone box houses, a neighborhood designed to accommodate the city’s burgeoning Black working-class families.
The narrow room symbolizes how for a child their world is first defined by spatial relationship. A narrow room in the first stanza represents a world the baby can easily grasp and catalogue and can happily (if recklessly) explore. Narrow suggest accessible, user-friendly, accommodating space. In the second stanza, narrow symbolizes “pinchy” (Line 8) claustrophobic conditions, a space just big enough to break free from through the kinetic energy of the imagination.
What the poem, of course, does not chronicle is the inevitable reentry of that full-throttle imagination into the world of narrow rooms. For the adult, narrow will mean confining, a spatial representation of the narrow expectations and closed opportunities the impoverished Black girl will find in 1940s America.
Gods and Fairies
If the discarded fruit cans, the outhouse, and the inexpensive fruit bowl symbolize the real-time world of the child’s working-class life, the gods and fairies with whom she cavorts in the backyard symbolize the liberating energy of a child’s imagination. Those conjured entities are real to the child. In the child’s imagination, she dances not with wild animals or imaginary friends or exotic made-up creatures like unicorns or dragons.
Gods suggest her level of self-perception. Too young to understand any limits to her life, her life as pure horizon, she sees herself on par with nothing less than deities, that gods themselves would visit her home. This is not the Christian God, singular, but gods, plural, suggesting the girl reads and knows the intoxicating power of the imagination. And fairies symbolize the magical reach of possibility. Fairies are associated with fulfilling the desperate wishes of mortals, providing the experience of exceeding limits and wishing dreams into real-time. Unlike gods who too often interfere, fairies interact to alter lives, to gift the narrowest lives with sudden and unexpected breadth. The world in time will chase away the gods and render fairies ironic—but for now the child delights in their company.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
