The Crazy Woman

Brooks structures her twelve-line poem into three stanzas of four verses each, making them quatrains. The poem is metered like a ballad, which itself is a form that is highly varied. In this case, Brooks employs alternating lines of iambic metering—where an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable— but the length of each line pair varies between stanzas. This technique not only adds to the musicality and playfulness to this poem about singing, but it is also unpredictable and bucks convention, in a sense. As such, the unpredictable metering reinforces the speaker’s defiance of expectations; while most readers might expect a more predictable iambic pentameter metering and rhyme scheme, Brooks gives the reader a range of metering that is nonetheless structured and logical.

The poem contains a rhyme scheme that follows the pattern: ABCB CDED FBGB. Here, the second and fourth verse of each stanza rhymes, with echoes of the first stanza being repeated in the last. When this rhyme scheme and deliberate metering are combined, they work in opposition to the image of a “Crazy Woman” (Line 11), as the term “crazy” usually refers to disorder, lack of control, and messiness.