Gwendolyn Brooks “A Song in the Front Yard”

                Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry is dark, sad, and realistic sounding. You immediately get pictures of non-ideal lives, and the hidden face of America in these poems. It’s no wonder her biography talks of Blues tradition, because that’s what her poems are. “A song in the Front Yard” at first sounds like a middle class American poem of a young girl, but the last stanza reveals to us that it is probably a very poor neighborhood, where prostitutes walk, and a mother is trying to keep her child from being like them. I feel like this poem is slightly activist-like in the way that it illustrates how a young girl cant have the ideal childhood with friends. She is jailed to her front yard, in order to protect her from being subjected to the bad influences of the area, however it seems that the mother is unsuccessful as she has already seen and strives to be like the girls, “And I’d like to be a bad woman, too” (line 18). but only because she hasn’t seen the consequences.