Notes on form: A Street in Bronzeville

I mentioned murder. The poem is called "the murder" but what happens in it is not murder, it is manslaughter. A little boy sets his littler brother ("Short of the age of one") on fire: "Burned him up for fun." (I also mentioned my having a taste for the lurid.) The title, "the murder," is not literal, it is prescient, psychological: it is how Brucie will remember it--he murdered his brother--and how he will blame himself.

Notes on form: five stanzas, of four lines each, in ballad meter. In eight lines of the poem's twenty the leading unstressed syllable is dropped, and three of these are in the first stanza. You must then have read the bulk of the poem to establish its ruling meter, as you must read to the last stanza to be reassured it's manslaughter, not murder. After all, you think, if Brucie had meant, with malice aforethought, to kill Percy, would he "[keep] on asking, 'When / Is Percy comin' back?'" You land on this reassurance, and hope to stick the landing, only after the poet has insisted on murder in the previous, penultimate stanza:

No doubt, poor shrieking Percy died
Loving Brucie still,
Who could, with clean and open eye,
Thoughtfully kill.

That last line, dactyl then monosyllable, along the word break, the space between the words giving the second word added emphasis--"Thoughtfully kill"--breaks from the meter, though perfect in the preceding line, completely. That's how you know--you hope--that it is manslaughter not murder, despite what the line says on its face, because wouldn't malice aforethought know to fit itself neatly into the ruling meter? Wouldn't the contemplative mind premeditating murder hide behind the contemplative poet planning her verse?

You hope. And I shall drop the pretense, I think you are quite right to be reassured, and I think Brooks means us to be, placing Brucie's question--"When / Is Percy comin' back?"--at the poem's end.

Maybe we can crowdfund Brucie's therapy.

*

A note on form in "Ballad of Pearl Mae Lee." Pearl May Lee, whose ballad is addressed to Sammy, has the dubious pleasure of being the woman in Sammy's "black folks bed." Sammy, however, has a taste for "pink and white honey," and he doesn't treat Pearl Mae right: "Often and often you cut me cold, / And often I wished you dead." But one day Sammy gets his wish: "a white girl passed you by one day, / And, the vixen, she gave you the wink." "In the back of her Buick you drank your fill." Yet the white girl, the vixen, poisoned the cup. Having let him drink his fill, "she roused you out of your dream." "'You raped me, n[-----],' she softly said." "'I'll tell every white man in this town.'" And the law comes after Sammy: "off they took you, off to the jail, / A hundred hooting after." But the law can't save him from hooting hundred: "And they stole you out of the jail. / They wrapped you around a cottonwood tree. / And they laughed when they heard you wail." They aren't the only ones who laugh; Pearl Mae Lee laughs too, at the news. It's what Sammy had coming. "I cut my lungs with my laughter, / Laughter, / Laughter. / I cut my lungs with my laughter."

(I told you the poem was lurid.)

But where's my note on form? It's here, in the comparison of two stanzas. The former is the fifth stanza, of the poem's sixteen--

Oh, dig me out of my don't-despair.
Pull me out of my poor-me.
Get me a garment of red to wear.
You had it coming surely,
       Surely,
       Surely,
You had it coming surely.

--and the latter is the poem's last:

Oh, dig me out of my don't-despair.
Pull me out of my poor-me.
Get me a garment of red to wear.
You had it coming surely.
       Surely.
       Surely.
You had it coming surely.

There are exactly three differences between these stanzas: three periods for commas. In the former stanza Pearl Mae Lee is still laughing, as she recounts the story; but in the latter, the last...The lady doth protest too much, methinks. The hilarity has dissipated, and the irony. Her don't-despair, her poor-me, are sincere, this time around; and she is not sure at all.

It is amazing, what punctuation can do. Annie Dillard writes, in "Notes for Young Writers":

Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations.

I think Dillard is talking (mostly) to writers of prose; I think punctuation in poetry does indicate the lengths of pauses. In this case, the periods make you pause much longer than the commas do, and the pause extends itself for another beat as you do the work of crossing empty space to the next, and unsure, "Surely."

The logical relation between the former and latter stanzas is a move from irony to earnestness--and also vice versa. A transitive property at work, if you will.