I know most people love the poem "We real cool" best of all—and I’ll admit right now that I’m probably a bigger Mystikal fan than any poet my age in academia today. But it’s not their lyrics, proper, I love. There are Gwendolyn Brooks poems, the lyrics of which I do, and dearly, love—"The Bean-Eaters," for example, and this heart-rending ballad-sonnet, whose title introduces another high yell on behalf of proud admixtures: for a ballad-sonnet is half plaint, half straint. And the people’s ballad and the ivory tower’s sonnet are nowhere so deftly married as in this poignant song, a young woman’s apprehension of her lover’s death in battle.

     Just as, in the "The Bean-Eaters," a phrase like "a plain and creaking wood" manages both to turn literature’s groaning-board to a sparer, simpler advantage as the elderly couple’s kitchen table, and also deftly to recall that other pining place, the coffin—similarly, this young lover’s song manages to be plain and fine at once. Such simple loveliness as those that occupy the sonnet’s second and fourth lines ("They took my lover’s tallness off to war" and "What I can use an empty heart-cup for") make for irresistibly moving materials.

     Four out of five of the first lines are end-stopped; to read through them is to feel a rhetorical sub-understanding develop, about how heavily ends can fall. Brooks then expertly breaks up the sixth line (the first one explicitly to mention the word "end") by giving the young woman a kind of syntactical stammer, later to be matched, semantically, by the young man’s own stammer, which is mentioned (rather than illustrated) in the sixth line after hers. Hers is the stammer of a primary resistance to death—his of an ultimate acquiescence to it. Also written into Brooks’s savvy rhetorical design is a sad knowing about certain gendered counterpoints of nature—engendered ones, too, since the poem’s source and destination both involve the "mother."

     There are two rhetorical turns in particular, in this sonnet’s tender outcry, for which I want to hold out extra-wild admiring (just as in "The Bean-Eaters" I especially loved the interbraided elements of the second stanza’s paired and counterpoised effects: "Two who are Mostly Good. / Two who have lived their day, / But keep on putting on their clothes, / And putting things away." (Wow! just look at those two on’s; look at those two putting’s!). Here in the ballad-sonnet, it’s first the repetition of "would have to be untrue" that wows me: it both dares and deepens the thought, even as it is being expressed. I love how that phrase’s repetition rips the poem’s spoken fabric into fragments, as it then goes on to hazard the extraordinary turn "Would have to court/Coquettish death"—a move so exquisite, with its modal hint of continental courtesy, as to call up the very literally European (battle) grounds of the American lament.

     Instead of some Francoise, of course, the coquette turns out to be the human being’s always-alien and always-prior claimant, death. The way the word "arms" does double duty, the way the word "beauty" is modified by the double sense of "sort"—the sorrow of the proprieties of war being precisely that it demands an other, an impersonal, kind of fidelity from its young men, calling them deserters UNLESS they say yes to death (and no to the magnetic fields of personal love)—desertion! the very term by which a marriage can be ended; yet if the soldier does not desert, the marriage may never begin—all these ironies play delicately into the balance, toward the sonnet’s close. After such subtleties, the many meanings of the young man’s "hesitation" and his "change" are so likely—linguistically—to seduce us into collateral considerations that we may be amazed, by the time we reach the last line, to hear the poem’s first line befall us again, its rhyme now a knell of annulments.