The birth in a narrow room

“Children of the Poor” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1949)

From the same collection as “the birth in the narrow room,” the poem reflects on the struggles of disenfranchised parents. As such the poem can be read as a complimentary perspective to “the birth”—how to care for a child when love is not enough, when the child feels like the “little lifting of helplessness.” Money cannot buy happiness—Brooks is not so crass. But money would secure stability and give a parent a chance to comfort their children.

“On Imagination” by Phillis Wheatley (1773)

Brooks often acknowledged her creative debt to Wheatley, a slave in the days of American Revolution. Brooks admired Wheatley’s mastery of the forms of British poetry and her deft use of those models despite the reality of her life as an enslaved person. Indeed, this poem describes how Wheatley can find joyous escape and authentic liberation through her fancy, an idea Brooks explores in the second stanza of this poem.

“Childhood” by Margaret Walker (1942)

A contemporary of Brooks and one of the leading figures in Chicago’s Black Renaissance, Walker, a transplanted Southerner, here presents a far different picture of childhood. She remembers as a child the impoverished conditions of her Deep South world during the Depression before her family migrated to Chicago, an apocalyptic world of “famine, terror, flood, and plague.