17 pages • 34 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksThe birth in a narrow room
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1949A 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 Innocence of Childhood
Without the context of Annie Allen, “the birth in a narrow room” celebrates the innocence of childhood regardless of race, gender, or economic class. The girl is not old enough to understand the complexities of those adult identities. She is a child, a newborn and toddler in the first stanza and a young child in the second, and in her explorations of her world and then her happy escape into her fantasy adventures she suggests the innocence of childhood.
Childhood is in its way a kind of benevolent, generous obliviousness. In the first stanza, the young baby awakens to the stunning revelations of the simplest objects in her world. Her grasping imagination takes a world teeming with objects unknown. Her vision is open and indiscriminatory, her perception captured by the merest objects. The ordinary things she takes in—an apron, a soup pot, a milk-glass bowl of cherries—speak to her, suggest mysteries, the shapes of their lines, the colors and textures beckon her to open up to a world that, we can guess, hardly ever stuns her parents anymore.
Awareness is only part of the poem’s definition of childhood. Childhood represents reckless courage, the willingness to engage a world without self-conscious limits, the bold entrance into a world full of things unknown. Tipping over the bowl full of cherries registers with the toddler only because the cherries themselves that spill over the floor are “pretty” (Line 6), so red, so shiny, so round.
Her awareness as yet un-dulled by routine and still unimpressed by caution, the girl prances in her backyard. There among the litter, she is like some high-stepping magical horse from one of her storybooks. Through the imagination, then, the child is and is not in that backyard.
The Impact of Poverty
If the poem treats only indirectly the question of racism and the impact of segregation in the cities of post-war white America, the poem does suggest the family into which the child is born is impoverished, a condition that in the Depression impacted all races. “the birth in a narrow room” treats the plight of the inner-city poor. The house where the girl lives is narrow, small; the house does not have indoor plumbing; the inexpensive translucent milk-glass bowls were a product of the Depression-era sense of value, more functional than valuable (a mint-condition Depression-era milk-glass fruit bowl now fetches a whopping $10); the backyard has a working pump for water; and the yard is scattered with cans and jars.
Brooks herself does not provide commentary on the impoverished world of her own childhood. Poverty is revealed through the vehicle of the perception of a young child who looks at everything around her, the conditions in which her family lives, but cannot yet see it. Poverty, then, is revealed by a child unable, not unwilling, to understand what she sees.
The reader surely understands what the child cannot: in time she will have to come to terms with the world in which she lives. But for now, the impact of poverty is revealed through the child’s happy ability to exist within a world she effortlessly conjures, a world that makes economic realities simply irrelevant.
Only indirectly then does Brooks condemn the unequal distribution of wealth in an America of boundless resources and wide opportunity. As the child prances giddily in her family’s narrow yard, prancing past her family’s outhouse and amid carelessly discarded cans of fruit, the reader sees what the child cannot yet: the unsettling reality of poverty in Depression America.
The Transformative Power of the Imagination
The world that surrounds the little girl is stubbornly what it is—a not terribly inviting real-time world. We only get bits—cheap furnishings, narrow rooms, tired parents, an outhouse, refuse in the yard—but from those fragments of the child’s observations we glimpse the world as the child cannot, a bleak world of limited expectations, of wholesale surrender to soul-crushing routine, the everyday world that seldom dazzles, seldom enchants. It is not that the Bronzeville neighborhoods of Brooks’s childhood were rundown or a blight—they were not. But the neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side were no match for the alternative worlds a child’s imagination produces.
The closing image of the poem, however, is soaring—the girl prancing about in a world she creates, a world she sustains. Even though she looks about her home and frets that “I am not anything and I have got / Not anything” (Lines 9-10), within the energy field of her imagination she plays with the gods. Within the adventure her imagination conjures, the girl sings free of the burden of her surroundings and taps into a carefree happiness that, in that moment, is as real as the jelly jars and the bugs, milk-glass bowls and yellow aprons. Enriched by her imagination, her world is transformed. She herself does not pray to God, which relegates her to a diminished position, but rather for those brief, passing moments she plays with gods, lots of them.
The transformative power of the imagination, while quite real and quite powerful to the girl, leaves her very much alone. The imagination for a child is self-justifying, self-sustaining, and self-satisfying. The girl needs no friends; her family is strangely (or wonderfully) irrelevant. Because of this loneliness, the child at the end is as happy as she is at risk. She has much to learn. If her poem is ending, the girl’s story is only beginning.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
