A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon

“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters” is written in free verse, meaning that Brooks does not adhere to any specific formal or metrical rules. Although the poem alludes to the ballad form—which is often rhymed and written in quatrains—“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters” is not written in quatrains or rhymed. In a particularly postmodern twist on form and meter, Brooks’s primary concern with the ballad form in this poem is its deconstruction. The poem is structured conceptually so that the ballad form is referenced and cast at the beginning, then is slowly deconstructed, in content and form, throughout the remainder of the poem. Even as the speaker sets up the rules and archetypes of the ballad, Brooks deconstructs the speaker’s view by purposefully avoiding set line lengths and rhymes, choosing instead to structure the poem formally around symbols and allusions.

Brooks’s poem is built upon allusions to the ballad form, and the ultimate falsehood of the speaker’s fantasy is wrapped in the trappings of romance. In order to fully analyze the speaker’s mindset, Brooks has to set-up the ballad allusion and then deconstruct it to illustrate its inability to live up to the brutality and violence of Emmett Till’s murder. The speaker begins the poem thoroughly entrenched in the allusion, but she is continually driven out of her fantasy and back into reality by her husband’s acts of violence and her own feelings of guilt. By ending the poem with a reference to “the last quatrain” (Line 136) of a true ballad, Brooks again uses literary allusion to juxtapose fantasy and reality—to clearly and ironically indicate the speaker’s quiet, fearful, and hate-filled acceptance of white male violence as the un-happy ending to real-life tragedy.