"A Song In The Front Yard" by Gwendolyn Brooks

 

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.

I want a peek at the back

Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.   

A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now   

And maybe down the alley,

To where the charity children play.   

I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.

They have some wonderful fun.

My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine

How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.   

My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae   

Will grow up to be a bad woman.

That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late

(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.

And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,

And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace   

And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

MY RESPONSE
            In Gwendolyn Brook’s poem, “A Song in the Front Yard,” the daring, rebellious diction delineates the yearning desire for the narrator to break out of the repetitive, boring routine of staying in her front yard. After seeing the same scenery day after day, “a girl gets sick of a rose” and wants to get “a peek at the back.” The loaded words and the sarcastic reaction the narrator has about others’ opinions in the third stanza of the poem create the feeling of being left behind in her backyard each day. The narrator wants to break through the binding fence and see the “wonderful things” people do and the “wonderful fun” they have. Finally, wanting to get out of the habitual schedule and walk down the street with “brave stockings of night-black lace” and paint on her face, the storyteller daydreams of the life she could one day have.