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Worksheet 10

Worksheet 10: Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi…”

The objectives of this worksheet are:

· To practice the 5 steps of close reading with Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi: Meanwhile a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.”

· To practice the skill of turning observations into arguments/theses.

Step 1: Definitions

Please provide brief definitions of the following words. You might find that these words have multiple meanings. Write down all the possible definitions (tip: some may be archaic !) that are applicable to the poem’s context.

“beat” (line 2)

“maid” (lines 6 and 11)

“mild” (lines 6 and 11)

“pursued” (line 7)

“fine” (line 8)

“unhorsed” (line 42)

“rest” (line 137)

Step 2: Paraphrase/summary

In the table, please write 2-3 sentences that summarizes each quoted section of the poem. One is done for you.

Who is speaking (what do we know about them)? Whom (or what) is the speaker addressing? What kind of relationship does the speaker have to the addressee? What is the speaker describing feeling, and what actions towards those feelings does the speaker take?

Poetic Language :

Paraphrase :

Herself: the milk-white maid, the “maid mild”

Of the ballad. Pursued

By the Dark Villain. Rescued by the Fine Prince.

The Happiness-Ever-After.

The speaker is a white woman in the South. She is addressing the romantic ballads she learned in her childhood. She imagines herself as a young virgin pursued by an evil villain and rescued by a prince. She is describing a fantasy that evokes feelings of fear, excitement, and happiness.

A.

But there was something about the matter of the Dark Villian.

He should have been older, perhaps.

The hacking down of a villain was more fun to think about

When his menace possessed undisputed breadth, undisputed height

And a harsh kind of vice

…

The fun was disturbed, then all but nullified

When the Dark Villain was a blackish child

Of fourteen, with eyes still too young to be dirty,

And a mouth too young to have lost every reminder

Of its infant softness.

B.

Then, before calling Him, she hurried

To the mirror with her comb and lipstick. It was necessary

To be more beautiful than ever.

The beautiful wife.

For sometimes she fancied he looked at her as though

Measuring her. As if he considered, Had she been worth it?

Had she been worth the blood, the cramped cries, the little stuttering bravado,

The gradual dulling of those Negro eyes,

The sudden, overwhelming little-boyness in that barn?

Whatever she might feel or half-feel, the lipstick necessity was something

apart. He must never conclude

That she had not been worth it.

C.

She did not speak. When the Hand

Came down and away, and she could look at her child,

At her baby-child,

Surely her baby’s cheek

Had disappeared, and in its place, surely,

Hung a heaviness, a lengthening red, a red that had no end.

She shook her head. It was not true, of course.

It was not true at all. The

Child’s face was as always, the

Color of the paste in her paste-jar.

D.

He whispered something to her, did the Fine Prince,

something

About love, something about love and night and intention.

She heard no hoof-beat of the horse and saw no flash of the shining steel.

He pulled her face around to meet

His, and there it was, close close,

For the first time in all those days and nights,

His mouth, wet and red,

So very, very, very red,

Close over hers.

Then a sickness heaved within her. The courtroom Coca-Cola,

The courtroom beer and hate and sweat and drone,

Pushed like a wall against her. She wanted to bear it.

But his mouth would not go away and neither would the

Decapitated exclamation points in that Other Woman’s eyes.

Step 3: Noticing (collect data for interpretation)

We are going to skip this step today and focus on transforming Step 2 into Step 4. See below:

Step 4: Analyze and interpret

When we write papers we have to transform our observations into arguments about what the text means. To turn an observation into an argument, we must ask ourselves one of the following questions:

What does this detail tell us about the poem’s meaning?

What does this detail tell us about the poem’s literary context?

What does this detail tell us about history, society, or culture?

Copy three of your summaries from Step 2 below under “Observation”. Imagine that you are writing a paper for this class and must form a thesis (argument) using your observations. I have done one for you as a model:

Observation :

Claim/ Argument :

The speaker is a white woman in the South. She is addressing the romantic ballads she learned in her childhood. She imagines herself as a young virgin pursued by an evil villain and rescued by a prince . She is describing a fantasy that evokes feelings of fear, excitement, and happiness.

“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters…” by Gwedolyn Brooks exposes white Southern men’s desire to protect white womanhood as a racist fantasy rather than a nobly heroic calling.

(Notice how this makes an argument about Southern culture by using the poem)

A.

B.