18 pages • 36 minutes read

The Crazy Woman

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1960

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Brooks structures her twelve-line poem into three stanzas of four verses each, making them quatrains. The poem is metered like a ballad, which itself is a form that is highly varied. In this case, Brooks employs alternating lines of iambic metering—where an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable— but the length of each line pair varies between stanzas. This technique not only adds to the musicality and playfulness to this poem about singing, but it is also unpredictable and bucks convention, in a sense. As such, the unpredictable metering reinforces the speaker’s defiance of expectations; while most readers might expect a more predictable iambic pentameter metering and rhyme scheme, Brooks gives the reader a range of metering that is nonetheless structured and logical.

Rhyme

The poem contains a rhyme scheme that follows the pattern: ABCB CDED FBGB. Here, the second and fourth verse of each stanza rhymes, with echoes of the first stanza being repeated in the last. When this rhyme scheme and deliberate metering are combined, they work in opposition to the image of a “Crazy Woman” (Line 11), as the term “crazy” usually refers to disorder, lack of control, and messiness. By contrast, the speaker expresses themselves with order and intent. The clean structuring of the poem furthers the idea that the woman is in fact quite intentional, while “the little people” (Line 9) are incapable of following her logic.

Alliteration

Alliteration is when a poet places similar sounding words, or words starting with the same letter near one another. This literary device gives the poem a melodious quality that can shift the tone of a poem and make the poem pleasant to read out loud. In “The Crazy Woman,” Brooks uses alliteration to infuse the woman’s voice with a songlike quality. It is as if the woman’s words are a song themselves. The poem is about a woman choosing when to sing a song, and she explains her dilemma and decision in a singsong tone.

The alliteration starts in the first lines of the poem, with the repeated “s” sounds of “I shall not sing a May song / A May song should be gay” (Lines 1-2). This repeats again in Line 4 with “And sing a song of gray” (Line 4), carrying this playful sound through the first verse. This “s” sound is carried through the poem, and found in “That is” (Line 6), “frosty” (Line 7), “sing” (Line 8), and so on. The constant occurrence of alliteration supports the authority of the woman’s voice, and, once again, advances the notion that this woman is not actually crazy.