21 pages • 42 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksThe Lovers of the Poor
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“The Lovers of the Poor” is a satirical free verse poem with 99 lines broken into seven sections. The lengths of the sections vary from four lines to 28 lines long; new sections are indicated by an indented line like a paragraph break. These verse paragraphs are narrative: They tell a story starting when the ladies arrive and ending when the ladies leave the home of the poor.
The lines vary in length, as well as in meter. Many lines hover around 10-13 syllables, filling most of a standard book-size page, but creating a ragged right-hand edge. However, the indented lines sometimes run past the righthand margin of a standard book-size page. This adds to the verse paragraph structure of the piece.
Rhyme
Throughout the poem, Brooks incorporates both perfect and slant rhyme, though not uniformly. For instance, Lines 95 and 96 have a perfect rhyme at the ends of the lines: “Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall, / They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall” (Lines 95,96). When two subsequent lines have end-rhymes, they can be called a couplet. However, these lines also contain an internal repetition of one the rhyme words: hall. This repetition creates an internal rhyme, or a rhyme within a line. The repetition and rhyme of hall emphasizes how the specific location of the poor home is not included, unlike the names of the neighborhoods where the ladies live.
Slant rhymes are words that almost but do not quite rhyme. They tend to have assonance and/or consonance, which are repetition of the same vowels or consonants, respectively: “The worthy poor. The very very worthy / And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?” (Lines 23-24) While both of the words at the ends of these lines contain the same letters, “rthy,” the vowel sound before the grouping is different, which makes this a slant rhyme. However, the repetition of “worthy” within Line 23 is a perfect internal rhyme. This sonically sets those who are swarthy—who have darker skin—slightly apart from those who the ladies deem as worthy of charity.
Catalogs
Brooks’s poem includes many lists, which are often referred to as catalogs in poetry. These appear not only as items separated by commas in the same sentence, but also as strings of sentence fragments. For instance, after the catalog of descriptions of the ladies—which consists of items like “Sleek, tender-clad” (Line 15) separated by commas—there are four sentence fragments. These all begin with the word “To” (Lines 19-21) and describe several different abstract notions of what charity is. The women aim “To be a random hitching-post” (Line 20), or a place to tie one’s horse, to the poor. However, the women have cars, which is mentioned in Line 46, and hitching posts are anachronistic in 1960. This abstraction, and the others in this list of sentence fragments, do not address the issues that the poor face in reality.
Related Titles
By Gwendolyn Brooks
