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.
Themes
The Corruption of Philanthropy
“The Lovers of the Poor” is a satire about rich, white women who decide to engage in philanthropy. Brooks’s speaker reveals how the members of the Ladies’ Betterment League do not actually love the poor. Their largesse—the generous giving of gifts—becomes associated with loathing alongside love. The paradox of loathe-love appears in several lines: “Why, what are bringings / Of loathe-love largesse?” (Lines 75-76). The word “why” indicates that the ladies are unsure of their motivations for helping the poor. They are also unsure of what to give the poor because they only claim to love them while truly loathing them. Later in the poem, the ladies wonder if there is a different poor home “Where loathe-love likelier may be invested” (Line 93). Outwardly, they pretend their charity is motivated by love, but their primary emotion, shown by its repeated position in the hyphenated “loathe-love,” is repulsion.
In their fickle attention, the women establish qualifications for who is deserving of charity. They are seeking the “very very worthy” (Line 23). This, like modern means-testing in welfare programs, promotes the idea that not everyone is worthy of food, shelter, and clothing—basic human needs. To become too vocal about these needs is to be categorized as “noxious needy” (Line 30), which is not a quality that the worthy poor exhibit. The ladies are looking for someone who fits the abstract notion of a good poor person: “Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost” (Line 62). Lost is capitalized, as if it were a specific person or group of people. This abstraction is developed by the fact that the poor are not tied to a place. The speaker never names the actual location of the poor home(s) the ladies visit in Chicago.
One disqualification for worthiness is having too many children. Poor people, who are usually non-white, have been victims of forced sterilization. This is alluded to in the line describing the ladies as “sweetly abortive” (Line 16). They believe that limiting the population of poor (and non-white) people is a good, or sweet, thing. Later in the poem, the ladies are offended by the “children children children” (Line 82) they see in the poor home. The run-on repetition here without commas or conjunctions illustrates the uncontrolled overflow of children. The ladies exclaim “Heavens!” (Line 82), which is a restrained and socially acceptable way to express disgust.
Undercurrent of Colorism
Dark skin color is another disqualification for being worthy of charity, but is more indirectly approached rather than outright stated. Colorism is discrimination that increases based on how dark one’s skin tone is. The ladies in Brooks’s poem hint that the poor people they visit are Black. On one level, adjectives like “dim” and “dirty” (Line 25) respectively mean unintelligent and unclean. On another level, these words refer to skin color. People who do not have white skin are considered not only inferior, but also unclean. “Darkness” is another repeated word that has the undercurrent of colorism, and is repeated in Lines 36 and 37. This can refer to the absence of light, or “dirty light” (Line 37), which casts non-white light as unclean or impure. White supremacists use rhetoric about lightness and purity when arguing for the purity of the human race.
In addition to “swarthy” (Line 24), the word “sooty” (Line 92) can refer to skin tone acquired either by genetics or occupation. While the outdated term “swarthy” may refer to someone who has tanned skin from working outside under the sun, sooty may refer to someone who has stained skin from working as a chimney sweep, miner, or other professions that deal with substances like ash and coal. These occupations generally do not pay enough to afford the luxuries that are listed when the speaker describes the lives of the wealthy ladies. Manual labor is considered dirty and the ladies do not want to get their skirts stained by people who engage in these professions. Further, non-white people are likely to work in lower-class occupations, so the undercurrent of colorism hints at the color of the skin under the soot or tan.
Slavery, the peculiar institution responsible for colorism in the United States, is mentioned in “The Lovers of the Poor.” The phrase “the puzzled wreckage / Of the middle passage [...] shames” (Lines 79-80) refers to the diaspora—the redistribution of people away from their homeland—due to the African slave trade. The middle passage was one leg of the triangular slave trade route across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe, Africa, and the United States. Many enslaved Africans died on this journey, and those who survived were separated from their families and communities. The ladies of the Betterment League feel white, liberal guilt about slavery, but this does not translate to loving the poor or even believing all humans deserve basic necessities.
Overvaluing White Womanhood
The ladies of the Betterment League are embodied representations of colorism and celebrating whiteness. According to Henry Taylor in The Kenyon Review, Brooks’s “Flat portrayal of white characters [...] permits broad sarcasm and indulgence in playful diction, and it invites the white reader to feel excluded from the portrait until it is too late to escape inclusion in it” (Taylor, Henry. “Gwendolyn Brooks: An Essential Sanity.” The Kenyon Review, 1991). These characters illustrate the kind of beauty and femininity that America and other western cultures value. The ladies of the charitable guild are described as lovely and pink. They live in the “lovelier planes of enterprise” (Line 18), wear “lovely skirts” (Line 96), use “pink paint” (Line 6), and have “delicate rose-fingers / Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails” (Lines 64-65). Pinkish hues like rose are part of a beauty standard explored by poets such as Shakespeare. He wrote sonnets about how the complexions of muses were traditionally white and red (often depicted as two colors of roses).
These beauty standards play into the ladies’ ideas of worthiness. They only want to help the “beautiful poor” (Line 24). However, the third person speaker notes that only wanting to help beautiful people is unnatural. The ladies act “in the innocence / With which they baffle nature” (Lines 13-14). They are naive about the realities of living in poverty, but they do not exhibit the kind of natural empathy that other people (and animals) do for those in need. Their innocence, rather, is intentional ignorance about how the world outside of their rich neighborhood functions. They put their “pink paint on the innocence of fear” (Line 6). Fear, rather than love, is what they feel toward people who are different from them—people who belong to a different socioeconomic class, and people with different skin tones.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
