21 pages • 42 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksThe Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1957A 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 Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” is a free verse poem with 60 lines. Line lengths vary from three syllables to 16 syllables, which means the meter also varies. Stanza lengths vary from one line to 10 lines. This causes the right-hand side of the poem to be very ragged, with expanding and contracting amounts of white space. This gives the poem a very different look than the columns of justified text in a newspaper.
Brooks uses rhyme inside of and between stanzas. Because the stanzas vary in length, the rhyme scheme also varies. For instance, Stanzas 1 and 2 are connected with a rhyme. Lines 1-7 follow this rhyme scheme: AAABBBB, where the second rhyme sound (B) connects the two stanzas. Then, all of the lines in Stanza 3 rhyme (CCC), and all of the lines in Stanza 4 rhyme (DDD). Stanza 5 introduces alternating rhymes (EFFE). In Stanzas 6 and 7, the rhyme scheme becomes less consistent: GGGHIJII and KLLMMNOPQO, respectively. The end of the poem reintroduces a more consistent rhyme scheme. The final 12 lines—starting with Line 49 and ending with Line 60—are couplets, or pairs of rhymes (AABBCCDDEE). This gives the poem a song-like quality, where the lines rhyme like song lyrics.
Repetition
In addition to repeating end-sounds in rhyme words, Brooks repeats letters at the beginning of words, which is called alliteration, and words themselves. There are examples of all types of repetition in Lines 55-58: “men harassing brownish girls. / (The bows and barrettes in the curls / And braids declined away from joy.) / I saw a bleeding brownish boy. …” (emphasis added). The letter “b” is repeated seven times in four lines, and the word “brownish” is repeated twice. Repetition functions as emphasis, giving extra weight to the repeated word because it is also alliterative.
Furthermore, this quote includes an ellipsis, which Brooks repeats several other times in the poem. Ellipses appear at the ends of other lines (Lines 32, 26, and 23), as well as in the middle of Line 20. This punctuation mark indicates an omission or a trailing off of thought, reflecting the speaker saying there is “News I do not dare / telegraph to the Editor’s chair” (Lines 46-47). There are things the speaker and Brooks do not dare include in the poem, and they indicate these omissions with ellipses.
Iconography
Brooks uses the iconography (images and symbols that frequently appear in art) of Jesus and Mary. Jesus’s crucifixion is referred to as a lynching in the final line of the poem. This also draws upon the symbol of lynching Black people in America, which is a different type of iconography. The “bright madonnas” (Line 54) that Brooks includes are part of Christian iconography surrounding the Virgin Mary and other mothers of martyrs. This literary device develops the theme of connecting the persecution of Jesus with the persecution of Black people in America.
Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, in their book, No Caption Needed, argue that iconic images form a basis for citizenship and public behavior. The images of everyday life described by Brooks reflect this understanding, with iconic elements of civility describing a normal society. The poem uses this form of public iconography to demonstrate that anti-racist behavior is not modeled by the classic images of southern citizenship: sweet tea, shined shoes, and public concerns about the seasons. Rather, racism undergirds these civic images, turning to violence at surprising speed.
Related Titles
By Gwendolyn Brooks
