A Song In The Front Yard Poem Analysis

Black is the darkest color in the world and can be seen as the complete absence of light or the absorbance of all light. As its divisive nature suggests, the color black’s meaning varies from person to person. Overall, black is the unknown. A color without color, but is needed to produce all colors. A color that will either intrigue us or shy us away. This controversy is best represented as an archetype in “a song in the front yard” by Gwendolyn Brooks. The speaker of the poem, a young girl, is exceedingly sheltered. She wishes to venture outside of her front yard into the unknown and explore like the other children who have a more unconventional lifestyle than her. The girl imagines the unknown to be mysterious, filled with adventure, and
The daughter immediately contemplates “… I’d like to be a bad woman, too” (17). The daughter’s mindset leads her to believe that putting on “stockings of night-black lace” will put up a barrier between her protective lifestyle and who she longs to be within (19). She mentions multiple times of the “wonderful fun” that the children have, while she looks on in awe (10). As she thinks about wearing these stockings, she believes that afterwards, she will parade “with paint on [her] face” (20). In this moment, black represents the end of her old life, the protected one, and the beginning of her new life in the unknown. Nevertheless, her mother believes this unknown holds negative outcomes for her daughter and anybody associated with this outlandish
Innocence, regarding the child, seems to be parallel with inexperience and naivety. Due to the child’s lack of inexperience, the mother seems to have the upper hand and has the most reasonable outcome; however, the daughter is not swayed by the mother at the end of the poem. The ending of the poem is left ambiguous. It does not state whether the daughter put on the “brave stockings” or continued to live under her mother’s protected thumb. Yet, we can conclude that if the daughter did venture out into the unknown, her dreams of what the world could be like, would be far less freeing than what she had hoped for. Nonetheless, the daughter is not necessarily wrong; she has a freshness that her mother lacks due to age. The mother has experienced the mystery, the rebellion and the new beginnings, and seems to have found that those characteristics do not make up for the melancholy, death and chaos that seems to come with the unknown. The mother knows that another’s life may look better from the outside and is more than just painting on a face and slipping on black stockings to survive (20). There is a greater possibility of the daughter going out there and experiencing the mystery of black for herself than listening to her mother’s wisdom. To the inexperienced, the color black is a curiosity that cannot be ignored. However, to the experienced, the