19 pages • 38 minutes read
Gwendolyn Brooksmy dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Gwendolyn Brooks's sonnet is a part of a larger context of poems that focus on the horrors of war and subvert the glorification of battle. Many famous poems counter the romanticization of war and, thus, share a context with “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell.”
Siegfried Sassoon fought in World War I and wrote poems about its hellish qualities. In “They” (1917), a bishop tells the soldiers they’ve fought for a “just cause,” but the soldiers, like the speaker in Brooks’s poem, are unsure. The soldiers in Sassoon’s poem tell the bishop they’re not the same and list the injuries they’ve suffered—including the loss of legs. In Sassoon’s poem, the worries expressed by Brooks’s speaker come true, as the soldiers aren’t so pure and loving anymore, and their bodies aren't intact.
Another World War I poet is Wilfred Owen. His poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920) also uses hell to symbolize combat. Both Brooks and Owen include the devil, with Owen comparing a face to “a devil sick of sin.” A few years before World War II broke out, Dylan Thomas published “The Hand That Signed the Paper” (1935), which links to the insensible, unspeakable elements of war addressed in Brooks’s poem. In 1940, a year after World War II started, the American poet W. H. Auden published “September 1, 1939.” As with Brooks’s speaker, Auden’s speaker feels helpless and horrified by the war.
Additionally, Gwendolyn Brooks’s sonnet owes a debt to the Harlem Renaissance—the loosely connected group of Black artists in New York during the 1920s and 30s who propelled one another and later generations to speak their truth and express themselves unapologetically. Brooks wanted to add her voice to the Black community, yet she was uncomfortable with what she felt to be the movement’s fetishization of Blackness. Brooks didn’t want to erase skin color, but she didn’t want race to be the only trait to define her speakers. Brooks's goal to present Black people as people might be why “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” makes no mention of the soldier’s skin color.
Historical Context
To better understand “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell,” the reader should know a bit about the historical context of World War II, which is the war the soldier is fighting in. It will be the deadliest war in history, killing more than 70 million people. Over 30 countries will fight in the war, including the United States, England, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and France. At first, the United States avoided direct involvement. They provided weapons to England but didn’t send soldiers into battle. However, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, a naval base in Hawaii, President Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the war. Soon, he sent soldiers, like the speaker of Brooks’s poem, into theaters of war across the globe.
In Ken Burns’s nine-part documentary about World War Two, The War (2007), the soldiers interviewed explain a term they used: FUBAR or “fucked up beyond all recognition.” The war was fatal and vicious, and fighting in the war was chaotic—as the acronym FUBAR indicates. The distressing disorderliness of the war could be why Brooks’s speaker only hears the quizzical word “[w]ait” (Line 7). Additionally, with “puny light” and “eyes pointed in” (Line 8), recognition isn’t easy. Then again, perhaps that’s the point—the soldier doesn’t want to see the mess he’s in.
Roosevelt depicted the war as a fight against the inhumane, intolerant Nazis. They were persecuting and deliberating killing Jews, people with mental and physical hardships, alleged political enemies, and anyone Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany’s totalitarian leader, thought was unfit to share the earth with his ideal race of human beings. Of course, in the United States, people continued to persecute and kill Black people. As many Black soldiers pointed out, it wasn’t as if the United States was free of prejudice. The lethal racism could account for the speaker’s concerns in Brooks’s sonnet. In a racist land that treats the soldier as inferior, the soldier can’t afford to harbor big dreams. The soldier wants little and intangible things that even America’s racist policies can’t effectively deprive him of, like bread, honey, and love.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
