Gwendolyn Brooks

Boy Breaking Glass

Boy Breaking Glass - form Summary

Free-verse Collage of Voices

This poem uses free verse and a collage-like structure of shifting voices and fragments. Lines alternate between declarative statements, quoted speech, and associative lists to create a jagged rhythm that mirrors the broken window image at its center. The form emphasizes public and private registers—artistic ambition, complaint, urban detail—and produces a tonal mix of wit, bitterness, and music. The poem’s discontinuities make meaning emergent rather than explicit.

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To Marc Crawford from whom the commission Whose broken window is a cry of art (success, that winks aware as elegance, as a treasonable faith) is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première. Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament. Our barbarous and metal little man. “I shall create! If not a note, a hole. If not an overture, a desecration.” Full of pepper and light and Salt and night and cargoes. “Don’t go down the plank if you see there’s no extension. Each to his grief, each to his loneliness and fidgety revenge. Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.” The only sanity is a cup of tea. The music is in minors. Each one other is having different weather. “It was you, it was you who threw away my name! And this is everything I have for me.” Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau, the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty, runs. A sloppy amalgamation. A mistake. A cliff. A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.