18 pages • 36 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksBoy Breaking Glass
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987A 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
“Boy Breaking Glass” is in free verse—poetry that lacks a regular rhyme scheme. In terms of overall structure, the poem is nearly symmetrical, with the first and last stanzas comprising six lines, the second and seventh stanzas comprising two lines, and the third and sixth stanzas comprising two lines.
The middle of the poem comprises a fourth stanza of five lines and a fifth stanza of two lines. That arrangement points the reader to the heart of the poem, the struggle between the boy’s voice (represented in the fourth stanza) against the voice of observers, artists, or readers (represented in the fifth stanza). In choosing to give the boy more lines, Brooks spatially represents the importance of recognizing the boy as the authority on his own existence, no matter how oblique his efforts to express himself.
In terms of rhythm, the poem is in free verse, but the lines frequently fall into iambs—an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in “Whose brok |en win | dow is | a cry | of art ” (Line 1) and “If not | a note, | a hole” (Line 7). These lines belong to the speaker/observer and the boy, respectively. The rhythm in these instances is musical and regular, reinforcing Brooks’s focus on what counts as art: Given the chance, the boy can speak just as artfully as the speaker/observer in the poem.
Consonance
Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in a poetic line or lines. It is a form of alliteration, the repetition of consonant and vowel sounds. For example, consonance occurs in Lines 1-2—“Whose broken window is a cry of art / (success, that winks aware.” These lines are in free verse; the repetition of the “w” sound is one of the ways Brooks connects the lines to each other. At the end of the poem, Brooks relies on consonance again—“Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau / the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty” (Lines 22-23). The “l” sounds in particular connect the nouns thematically: these words are all places and things the boy will never encounter because of the limitations of his environment.
Ambiguity
Ambiguity occurs when a word or line has more than one plausible meaning. In Line 17, “The music is in minors,” one can read “minors” (Line 17) both as a musical term or as a reference to the age of the boy who breaks the window. Both meanings work to reinforce themes of the poem since the poem is an exploration of both how to see the broken window as art and of Black childhood. In Line 24, “runs” may be a reference to the action of the boy after he breaks the window, or it may be a description of what the boy does not have, with “runs” (Line 24) being the musical term for a series of notes that make the singer stand out from the accompanying music. The first meaning underscores that the boy’s actions are what he has to express himself, while the second meaning underscores the boy’s invisibility.
Related Titles
By Gwendolyn Brooks
