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Gwendolyn BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
As the first of the title indicates, a critical theme of the poem is young people. The speaker sketches a portrait of young people as wild, uproarious, and somewhat reckless. The theme plays on youthful archetypes and how young people are typecast. Not all young people are at odds with harmony or feel the need to rebel against a commanding authority like the sun. Yet the theme of youth links to, for better or worse, the standard portrait of youth manifested throughout literature and media, from Brooks’s flippant young pool players in “We Real Cool” to Bret Easton Ellis's sinister novel Less Than Zero (1985) to the sensationalized teen narratives in the HBO TV series Euphoria (2019).
The daring and destructive theme of young people connects to the theme of night. In a sense, these two themes complement each other, with youth representing night and night representing youth. The speaker wants the speech-giver to tell the young audience, “It cannot always be night” (Line 7). This statement confirms the link between night and youth. Night is as wild and dangerous as young people and vice-versa. The alliance between young people and night is also confirmed earlier in Line 3 when the speaker refers to young people as “sun-slappers.
By Gwendolyn Brooks
A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon
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A Sunset of the City
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Boy Breaking Glass
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Cynthia in the Snow
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Maud Martha
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my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
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The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
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The birth in a narrow room
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The Blackstone Rangers
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The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
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The Crazy Woman
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The Lovers of the Poor
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The Mother
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the rites for Cousin Vit
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To Be in Love
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To The Diaspora
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Ulysses
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We Real Cool
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