The birth in a narrow room

More than two decades before Brooks began to experiment with open verse that captured the ragged syncopated music of the street world of her South Side Chicago, here Brooks uses a traditional poetic meter, inherited from white European models, to create her heroic portrait of a young Black girl coming into awareness. Like Phillis Wheatley, an African-born slave in pre-Revolutionary War Boston who found in elegant transcriptions of her life into European poetic models a defiant expression of her own fused identity, her roots in Africa, her reality in white Massachusetts, Brooks uses a variation of the alexandrine line—six units of stressed and unstressed syllables per line, for a total of 12 syllables—to infuse the picture of a Black child growing up impoverished with elegance and dignity.

The alexandrine line, a demanding and virtuoso meter because it requires the sonic manipulation of a relatively long line, must be both disciplined and sinewy or the recitation becomes clumsy and prosaic. Because the six-unit line lends itself to conversation tone and because the second beat in each unit can be stressed or un-stressed, the poem invites recitation that can work with breaks and allow dramatic lingering. For this reason, it is the verse line of epics and tragedies, verse forms that tell stories. Thus, the metrical scheme gives the extraordinary ordinary childhood of this remarkably unremarkable child a sense of dignity and purpose.