17 pages • 34 minutes read
“The Lovers of the Poor” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1963)
This is another one of Brooks’s most well-known poems, and one of her longest. She employs perfect as well as slant rhyme, as well as iambic pentameter. Brooks’s third-person perspective follows the story most closely to the well-off Ladies of the Ladies’ Betterment League, examining social injustice from the perspective of unsympathetic oppressors.
“After Apple Picking” by Robert Frost (1914)
A significant departure in content from Gwendolyn Brooks, she and Robert Frost share the distinction of being influential 20th-century American poets. In “After Apple Picking,” Frost uses and breaks his rhyming rule freely:
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired (Lines 23-29).
The uneven meter and easy form give the poem a raw, intimate feeling. Moments of vulnerability in this poem are less gave than in “the mother,” though still poignant.
“Mothers” by Nikki Giovanni (1972)
This poem explores a mother-child relationship from the perspective of the child. Like Brooks, Giovanni limits her use of capital letters to keep the poem grounded.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks