Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)

"Night” by Charles Churchill (1761)

Charles Churchill is an 18th-century British poet. He wrote many satires, including “Night.” As in Brooks’s poem, Churchill juxtaposes day with night and presents day as dull and night as thrilling. For Churchill, daytime people are “slaves to business” and “bodies without soul.” Meanwhile, the night denizens enjoy a “happier state” since they don’t have to face reality or, as Brooks might say, "Live in the along.” In Churchill's poem, the binary between day and night sharpens, and Churchill’s speaker is firmly on the side of night, which probably wouldn’t please Brooks’s speaker.

"a song in the front yard” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1945)

This poem appears in Brooks’s first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville. Here, the speaker grapples with the temptation of going into the backyard and playing with the supposedly bad children in the neighborhood. As in "Speech to the Young," the wild youth in “a song in the front yard” are alluring and linked to night. As the speaker admits, “And I’d like to be a bad woman, too, / And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace.” Furthermore, both poems employ similar literary devices, including alliteration and repetition.