my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell

Gwendolyn Brooks is the author of the World War II sonnet “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell.” The poem, published in her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), is about a Black soldier heading off to fight in hell or World War II—the deadliest war in history. Although the poem doesn’t explicitly mention race or World War II, the poem is a part of a section of poems in A Street in Bronzeville titled “Gay Chaps at the Bar” (with gay likely connoting jubilance and not a sexual identity). Like the other sonnets in the sequence, letters from Black soldiers served as inspiration, so it’s safe to assume the soldier is Black. Although the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s informs the poem and Brooks’s work, Brooks felt the need to counter what her biographer George Kent calls “the exotic vein of the Harlem Renaissance” (A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, the University of Kentucky Press, 1990). Brooks’s aim to present Black people as part and parcel of the human race might be why the reader requires additional information to identify the soldier's race. The central message of the poem is that soldiers—Black soldiers, but not only Black soldiers—are people. As humans, they’re fragile, fearful, and not immune to the horrific consequences of combat.

Brooks’s willingness to tackle the unsettling and terrible parts of life appears in her other poems. In her most famous poem, “We Real Cool“ (1960), Brooks deals with the dire issue of heedlessly rebellious young people. In one of her more controversial poems, “the mother” (1945), Brooks addresses the issue of abortion. As the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize, Brooks has a deep and varied canon. She’s published around 20 books—poetry for adults, poems for children, two autobiographies, and a novel Maud Martha (1953). Though “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” is not one of Brooks’s most famous poems, it demonstrates her goal to give the average person a thoughtful voice. The soldier isn’t a prototypical hero; he's a regular guy just trying to survive a ghastly situation and return to home without suffering too much physical or emotional damage.

Poet Biography

Gwendolyn Brooks’s mother, Keziah Wims Brooks, was a teacher, and her father, David Brooks, was a janitor. They lived in Chicago but wanted to have Gwendolyn at Keziah’s parents’ house in Topeka, Kansas, so, on June 7, 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Kansas. With their newborn daughter, Keziah and David moved back to the South Side of Chicago. Brooks grew up in a neighborhood nicknamed “Bronzeville” since most of the people living there were Black. Her parents created an artistic and literary environment. Her mom and dad filled the house with singing and books. In his biography of Brooks, George Kent writes, “Legend has it that Keziah stated, ‘You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Dunbar was a formidable Black poet of the late 1800s/early 1900s.

Sure enough, Brooks wasted little time in launching her literary career. At 11, she published four poems in a local newspaper, Hyde Parker. Two years later, she published a poem in the national magazine, American Childhood. In her teens, she met Langston Hughes, the well-known poet affiliated with the Harlem Renaissance—a New York City-based movement composed of Black artists and writers who wrote proudly and unapologetically about their experiences. According to Angela Jackson’s scholarly biography of Brooks, A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun (Beacon Press, 2017), Hughes told her, “Keep writing! Someday, you’ll have a book published!"

Brooks had to graduate from a junior college and then work some awkward jobs to help her family, who, like people across the world, struggled financially due to the Great Depression. In 1937, Brooks joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council. She married another writer, Henry Blakely, and, in 1940, they had a son, Henry. The marriage was far from perfect. The couple separated near the end of 1969. Brooks enjoyed her freedom and independence, though she and Henry eventually reunited.

Returning to the 1940s—in 1941, Brooks attended a poetry workshop led by a wealthy white woman, Inez Cunningham. A reader for the influential Poetry magazine, Cunningham opened many doors for Brooks. In 1945, Harper & Row published her first book of poems, A Street in Bronzeville—so Hughes’s prediction came true.

The book featured a series of connected sonnets under the section “Gay Chaps at the Bar.” In A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun, Jackson says Brooks “recreates the tumult and urgency of young Black men at war.” Brooks dedicated the sonnets to her brother, Sargent Raymond Brooks, and to all soldiers.

In 1949, Harper & Row published Annie Allen, which won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, turning Brooks into the first Black person to take home the prestigious honor. “That's why I am as well known as I am today,'' quipped Brooks in a 1987 interview cited in her New York Times obituary by Mel Watkins “Gwendolyn Brooks, 83, Passionate Poet, Dies“ (2000). ''Sometimes, I feel that my name is Gwendolyn Pulitzer Brooks.''

The honors, grants, and publications piled up for Brooks. She received Guggenheim fellowships and a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She started to review books for the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. In September 1951, her daughter Nora was born. Two years later, she published her episodic novel, Maud Martha. In 1956, she published a collection of poems for children, Bronzeville Boys and Girls. In the 1960s, she became familiar with writers—Amiri Baraka, and Ron Milner, among them—connected to the Black Arts Movement. Like the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement encouraged Black writers to uncompromisingly assert their identity and voice.

Galvanized by the Black Arts Movement, Brooks left Harper & Row and started publishing with the Black-owned Broadside Press, which published her poetry collection Family Pictures in 1970 and each of her autobiographies. In 1976, Brooks became the first Black woman to be elected to the illustrious National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts gave her a lifetime achievement award.

In 2000, the dedicated Brooks died at her Chicago home. She was 83 years old. Summing up her unique gift for speaking to the common person, Harvey Curtis Webster, in a 1963 article for The Nation, called Brooks the “everywoman differentiated” (quoted in A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks). Although her talents made her stand out, she didn't stop communicating with the regular person.

Poem Text

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell.” 1945. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” is about a soldier in World War II, though reading the sonnet in isolation doesn’t tell what the poem is about explicitly. However, this sonnet is a part of a group of other sonnets focusing on Black World War II soldiers. All of the poems in this sequence are a part of a section “Gay Chaps at the Bar.” The title derives from a quote by Lieutenant William Couch, who describes soldiers coming back from war as “Gay chaps at the bar.”

The poem starts with the speaker discussing his honey and bread. They’re in “little jars” and “cabinets” (Line 2). The speaker has labeled them “clearly” (Line 3) and talks to them as if they are people. He says, “Be firm till I return from hell.” The speaker is going away, and his destination is a miserable war.

The soldier is “very hungry” and “incomplete” (Line 5), but he doesn’t have time to eat or compete himself because he has to endure the hell of war first. This horrible battlefield is a place of uncertainty, so the soldier doesn’t know when he “may dine again” (Line 6). Communication is missing, as no one tells him “word but Wait” (Line 7). Moreover, the hellish theater is dark with “puny light.” However, the bad lighting is probably for the best since the soldier wants to see as little as possible, so he keeps his “eyes pointed in” (Line 8).

While in this wretched World War II environment, the speaker thinks about how he’ll be when he can leave. He’s “hoping that” (Line 9) he’ll have the chance to “resume” (Line 10) his pre-war life and still have legs and the heart to “go home” (Line 12). He hopes that the hellish war hasn’t made him unfeeling or “sensitive” (Line 13) to the honey and bread he carefully put away before leaving. The speaker wants to retain his “old purity” and capacity to “love” (Line 14) the small pleasures in his life like bread and honey.