19 pages • 38 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksUlysses
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
Like Homer’s epic poems, Brooks's poem is divided into sections that describe distinct events. It has 19 lines over 9 stanzas. By not adhering to a specific poetic form, Brooks places a stronger emphasis on the purposefulness of the line breaks. The line breaks divide locations and stories, rather than merely conforming to a particular form.
This poem has no consistent form or meter. The only instance of end line rhyme is the sixth stanza, which is a rhyming couplet. By avoiding poetic techniques that could create a sing-song child-like effect, Brooks emphasizes how her child speaker experiences adult difficulties. The poem is not a fictional nursery rhyme, but a realistic monologue describing a child’s day-to-day life.
Allusion
Brooks makes extensive use of allusions to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey [See: Literary Context]. In Line 12, the narrator states that “Nobody Sees us, nobody stops our sin” (Line 12). Brooks here alludes to this famous scene of the Odyssey, where Odysseus tells the cyclops that his name is Nobody. The confusion resulting from whether or not anyone is actually escaping helps the men make it to freedom, and Brooks draws on this ambiguity in the poem. Her allusion to this episode implies not that the children are truly unseen in their deviance, but rather that people have turned a blind eye to the kids’ “sin” (Line 12).. This allusion also suggests that the children feel invisible.
Metaphor
Brooks uses a metaphor that alludes to the lotus eaters in The Odyssey [See: Literary Context]. In this scene, Odysseus and his men land at a mysterious island. On the island, the inhabitants offer the men lotus flowers to eat. These flowers cause people to feel eternal bliss, which results in the men not wanting to continue their journey home. Odysseus realizes this and stops his men from continuing to eat them. Brooks complicates this image, as she connects education with the lotus. The “teachers feed [them] geography” (Line 13) and the kids “spit it out in a hurry” (Line 14). The kids’ desire to return home causes them to reject formal education. Yet by going home, the poem suggests the cycle of violence is primed to repeat, as the poem ends with the same refrain as the opening.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
