19 pages • 38 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The first image in Brooks's sonnet relates to food, which gives the poem a domestic setting and situates it in a terrain typically linked to women. Indeed, the honey and bread subvert the masculinity of the soldier as it bonds him to stereotypical women's activities and spaces like cooking and the kitchen. Focusing on the feminine symbology and discarding the sonnet’s context can lead to reading “my dreams, my works must wait till after hell” as a poem about a woman who has to endure the confines of being a wife and mother and, in turn, can't focus on herself. On the Poetry Society of America's website, Tess Taylor interprets this poem in the context of repression and womanhood.
Separately, honey and bread can symbolize religion. Throughout the Bible, honey and bread appear, and they are often signs of nourishment and relief. In Psalms 81:16, God promises his faithful honey and “the finest of wheat.” The soldier puts his bread and honey in order as a way to stabilize his spirit. When he tells them, “Be firm” (Line 4), he's telling his spirit to stay strong because he's about to meet the “devil” (Line 11), so he'll need a God on his side and a sturdy spirit.
Light often represents insight and knowledge. For the famous Greek philosopher Socrates, light represents truth. Plato, one of Socrates's students, discusses Socrates’ idea about light and darkness in Republic (ca 380 BC). In “the allegory of the cave,” Socrates explains how people who live in the dark don't have a firm grasp on reality. They lose touch with the truth and mistake their shadows for real representations. Conversely, in “the analogy of the sun,” Socrates links the sun to goodness since the sun illuminates the world and allows people to determine what's true from what's illusion.
Since the soldier has only a “puny light” in hell, he'll have trouble identifying what's true. He's going into the cave where what's real and what's illusion is difficult to discern. Indeed, put in conversation with Socrates’ and Plato’s ideas about darkness and light, the “puny light” symbolizes the lack of knowledge in the theater of war. The brutality of combat blocks the sun, maims the truth, and leaves the soldier vulnerable to turning into a brutish person, who loses touch with what he cares about—his dreams and his works.
A motif that hovers around Brooks's sonnet is the idea of the journey. One way to read the poem is as an adventure. The soldier is about to go on a trip—a hellish trip but a trip nonetheless. The soldier puts everything in order at home, so when he returns from his journey he can resume his normal life.
The journey motif connects Brooks's sonnet to a host of works where a character has to endure hellish conditions. In Dante’s epic poem Inferno (ca 1314), Dante, having strayed from goodness, has to journey through hell to try and correct his course. Unlike Dante, the soldier doesn't need to visit hell because of personal choices but has been pulled off his path by events beyond his control. The journey can’t change the soldier for good but only for worse. Just as Brooks modifies the traditional sonnet form, she manipulates the typical journey trope by sending the soldier on a journey that doesn’t seem to serve any higher purpose.
By Gwendolyn Brooks