Compare And Contrast Randall And Brooks

Poems are like snowflakes, while they may share some similarities, no poem is the same as another. Every poem is different in regards to form, rhyme scheme, rhetorical strategies, and meaning. Both Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham” and 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 sets the two works apart.
Each of these works are written as ballads, which are poems that generally are written in quatrains, follow a strict rhyme scheme, and tell a story. While Randall and Brooks chose this as the structure of their poems, they

each adapt their 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, is like the ballads she was taught in school, and she begins to try to make the event fit into a 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 types.
“Ballad of Birmingham” portrays a conversation between a mother and daughter that shifts to a removed third person narrator to narrate the last half of the poem and ends with the final two lines belonging to the mother. The dialogue in the beginning of the poem provides character development of the mother and daughter. It is shown that the daughter is not worried about the violence happening in Birmingham, but that she just wants “To make our country free” (Randall 12). The mother is portrayed as everything a reader imagines mothers to be, she loves her child and cares about her safety, “And clubs and hoses, guns and jails / Aren’t good for a little child” (Randall 7-8). When the shift in narrator occurs, there is a change in the tone of the poem as well, from worried and caring to worried and tragic. This shift shows the transformation of the mother going from having a daughter going to a church to pray, to a mother that loses her daughter because she went to the church and died. The narration and point of view of “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” consists of a third person narrator, but rather than a removed narrator as in “Ballad of Birmingham,” the narrator is the unconscious thoughts of Carolyn Bryant who is experiencing these different feelings the morning after the trial where her husband was acquitted of the charge of murdering Emmett Till. While there is no narrator change in this poem, there is a change of focus from the speaker’s life, to the boy, and then back to her own life the reveal of her fear of her husband. This change emphasizes the importance of each aspect of the poem, it begins by setting the mood as just another day when the speaker realizes how truly terrible what happened was, the mood then shifts to dark and tragic because of the murder of a young boy. Once the narrator is back to her own life, the dark mood is still present when she starts thinking of herself and her own children and what her husband could do to them.
While each of these poems have their own narrators and own strategies regarding shifts of narration or focus, one main strategy that both poems employ is a use of mother figure to appeal to the emotions of the reader. 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 lines “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 then goes into looking at the events of what happened the day Emmett Till died, thinking if he was guilty or not and 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, “When the Hand / Came down and away, and she could look at her child, At her baby-child, She could think only of blood” (Brooks 113-116). Along with this “Mississippi mother,” there is also mention of the “Bronzeville mother,” when the speaker of the poem thinks back to court, she pictures Emmett Till’s mother after the trial, “But his mouth would not go away and neither would the / Decapitated exclamation points in that Other Woman’s / eyes” (Brooks 160-162). Pulling the mother of Emmett Till into the poem adds to the emotional impact the poem holds, the reader not only experiences emotion from the mother whose husband murdered Emmett Till, but from the mother who had her son taken away from her as well. Both of these poems emphasize the loss a mother experiences when her child is taken away from her, which is something that will affect any reader, mother or not.
Randall and Brooks chose to write fictional poems based on real events.

By doing this, they are able to add more details and give accounts from specific people that were impacted by the events and may not have gotten their voices heard otherwise and portray a deeper meaning to the events that occurred. Each of the poems also address people’s preconceived ideas about various things. In Randall’s poem, “Ballad of Birmingham” the mother wants her child to go to the church because a church is much safer than the streets where the riots are taking place. The mother is calmed by the idea and in fact, “The mother smiles to know her child / Was in the sacred place,” (Randall 21-22). When people think about a church, the often associate it with prayer, peace, and many consider churches to be a safe place. This is the case of the mother in this poem, she knows her daughter wants to go out, so she sends her to the safest place a person can imagine, a church. Her ideas of churches were shattered when she heard the explosion and found only her daughter’s shoe. Knowing her daughter died at the church, the church she went to because her mother told her she would be safe, leads to lines 23-24 “But that smile was the last smile / To come upon her face” and a sense of grief and guilt that this mother would now feel forever. A similar aspect of preconceived ideas and guilt occur in “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.” The speaker in this poem is thinking about romantic ballads and the damsel in distress saved by the prince master plot, “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” (Brooks 6-9). These are well known by all people, however, the speaker realizes life does not follow these specific types. The boy who was supposed to be the villain was too young and innocent and her husband, the supposed prince, was supposed to

save her, but she does not think that she needed to be saved, or at least be saved through murder. The speaker even plays with the preconceived ideas Emmett Till would have had, “That boy must have been surprised! For / These were grown-ups. Grown-ups were supposed to be wise” (Brooks 29-30). All of these ideas are what society has imagined people should be, but each person is different, and it took this tragic event for the speaker to realize this and she realized the prince was not so noble and the supposed villain was just somebody’s child.
Dudley Randall’s poem “Ballad of Birmingham” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” are poems 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 sets the two works apart.