Ballad Of Birmingham Analysis

One of the most beautiful things about poetry is the fact that one event can spark the most beautiful poems from an author’s mind. Similar events can be interpreted and presented in countless ways based upon the impact they held on the poet. Every poem is different in regards to form, rhyme scheme, rhetorical strategies, meaning, and countless other aspects, while they can still be mainly about similar events. Both Dudley Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” are written in the same era and convey similar messages; however, each poem’s form, point of view, and how they each approach the idea of preconceived notions are what set the two

While Randall and Brooks chose this as the structure of their poems, they each adapt the standards of ballads to better fit their intended goal. In Randall’s poem “Ballad of Birmingham,” the ballad is shorter and follows an ABCB rhyme pattern which makes the poem extremely rhythmic. This rhythm gives a song-like feature to the poem which conveys a certain happiness. As the reader follows the rhythm of the poem, it is hard to imagine anything bad happening and when the tragic ending ensues, it has a greater impact on the reader. Brooks plays with the strict structure of a ballad in “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” to help convey the meaning of the poem. The poem begins with the lines “From the first it had been like a / Ballad… Like the four-line stanzas of the ballads she has never / quite / Understood” (Brooks 1-2, 4-6). The speaker of the poem begins by addressing how this event, which is unclear at this point in the poem, is like the ballads she was taught in school and she begins to try to make the event fit into a typical romantic ballad. This, however, does not work because it is impossible to romanticize the murder of a child, and the speaker realizes that life cannot always follow a strict pattern where people have their set characteristics and fall into specific

In “Ballad of Birmingham” the reader gets the direct words of the mother as she tells her daughter the streets are not safe and that the child should go to church to “sing in the children’s choir” (Randall 16). After the transition to the removed narrator, the last two lines of the poem are again from the mother. The words “O, here’s the shoe my baby wore, / But, baby, where are you?” (Randall 31-32) become even more powerful after the reader has been removed from the characters to experience the poem from an outside source, to be brought back again to the mother the moments after she loses her child makes the tragic ending have an even greater impact on the reader. “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” begins with a mother doing an everyday thing, making breakfast. She reflects upon the events of what happened the day Emmett Till died, wondering if he was guilty or not and questioning the true reason why her husband killed this boy. Her thoughts then return to the breakfast table where she looks at her own children and imagines what her husband is capable of within their own family, as he already destroyed one family: “When the Hand / Came down and away, and she could look at her child, At her baby-child,