Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

“the mother” 125
review A Street in Bronzeville for Harper and Brothers, praised the
collection, but recommended leaving out “the mother” because of its
non-poetic subject matter. In a 1961 interview with Studs Terkel,
Brooks says: “This poem was the only poem in the book that Richard
Wright, who first looked at it, wanted to omit, and he felt that a
proper poem could not be written about abortions, but I felt otherwise,
and I was glad that the publishers left it in” (5). D.H. Melhem
explains that Brooks’ emphasis was, she felt, “not the abortion but
the poverty that made for ambivalence in the mother, thwarting her
maternal desire” (17).
Ungratified maternal desire finds outlet in the wrenchingly
poignant evocation of the imagined lives of the children this mother
“got” but “did not get” (2). Absence—the not-getting—is a befuddling
keynote of the mother’s monologue. She has, for herself, only
the not-having and she holds this airy construction as vehemently
as if she held the substance of “[t]he singers and workers that never
handled the air” (4). “Not having” is a searing thematic motif that
spreads throughout A Street in Bronzeville, with its modernist echoes
of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock.” The hard, barren ground of the Bronzeville streets stunts
growth and makes for a paltry harvest. Bronzeville begins with these
lines from “the kitchenette”: “We are things of dry hours and the
involuntary plan, / Grayed in, and gray. ‘Dream’ makes a giddy sound,
not strong / Like ‘rent,’ ‘feeding a wife,’ ‘satisfying a man’.” In his introduction
to The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, James Merrill recognizes
the “universal questions” within Brooks’ “keen and satisfying specificity,”
noting that “Brooks took especially seriously the inner lives
of young black women: their hopes, dreams, aspirations, disappointments.”
Brooks’ poems ask: “How do people tend their dreams in the
face of day-to-day struggle?. . . . How do black communities grapple
with the problems of materialism, racism, and blind religiosity?” (xvii).
The voice of “the mother” resonates with the voice of all motherhood,
sounding the primal chords of hope and unrelenting love even in the
face of unremitting losses.
Yet this mother also exhibits a darker side of motherhood as she
feasts on the deliciousness of her unborn children while intimating
that, had they lived, she may have harmed them: “You will never
neglect or beat / Them. . . . You will never leave them, controlling
your luscious sigh, / Return for a snack of them, with gobbling